He was too shy to take his turn singing poems with the other labourers and monks, and retired to a stable where he fell asleep and had a vision in which he was told to sing about God. His story was told to the abbess, who commanded him to sing, with wonderful results.
We know about all of this because of the great chronicler Bede, who was working in Jarrow just fifty years after it all happened. Bede insists, again and again, on the remarkable nature of what Caedmon did. Why? In modern translation his hymn sounds pious but almost blandly straightforward:
Now we must praise the Guardian of Heaven,
the might of the Lord and his purpose of mind,
the work of the Glorious Father; for he,
God Eternal, established each wonder,
he, Holy Creator, first fashioned
heaven as a roof for the sons of men.
Then a Guardian of Mankind adorned
this middle earth below, the world for men,
Everlasting Lord, Almighty King.
This hardly seems like the beginning of the great story of English poetry. But almost everything about it should unsettle our sense of who we are, right at the beginning.
Let’s start with the obvious, the Christian theme of the poem. Caedmon’s world had been, until relatively recently, a pagan one. Christianity had arrived in Britain long before, towards the end of the Roman era; and it was strongly established in Wales, Ireland and western Scotland, in the Celtic Church whose rites went back to early Rome. Since then, however, the waves of Germanic invaders – Angles from Denmark and northern Germany, the Saxons and the Jutes – had pushed the old Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants to the west, re-establishing paganism as they slaughtered, and then settled.
Now, Northumbria, one of the new and powerful Germanic kingdoms of Britain, was being reintroduced to the religion of Christ by missionaries from the Scottish island of Iona, themselves originally Irish. In modern times, we often assume that new ideas bubble up from the south and move north – and for centuries the Celts and the Irish were regarded by the southern English as barbarians. All wrong: right here at the beginning of the story, the new Christian religion had been brought southwards and eastwards from the north and west. Caedmon’s monastery itself had been founded by Irish monks.
Eventually, a different form of Christianity would push up across the Channel, and establish a new base at Canterbury, after Pope Gregory I sent Bishop Augustine to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent in 596. But when our ploughman made his poetry he was living in the Celtic religious world, not the English one. Caedmon’s Northumbria, with its monasteries at Lindisfarne, Whitby and Jarrow, was a great European centre of learning until it fell to the Vikings. And if many today think of Canterbury as the natural home of ‘English Christianity’, let’s remember that Canterbury’s power owed much to the arrival of a Greek, Theodore, and a North African monk, Hadrian.
Caedmon’s Britain was differently shaped from today’s state. After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, the islands were a hodge-podge of tiny warring statelets: warlords passed power to their children and established royal dynasties. These slowly congealed into larger kingdoms. The great ethnic division was between the Celtic or British people still surviving in the west and north, and their enemies, the immigrant Germanic tribes of the south and east. Today ‘Welsh’ describes the land and the people to the west of Offa’s Dyke, the smallest of the nations of Britain. But around the time Caedmon was writing, the ‘Welsh’ were everywhere. There was for instance a kingdom of Welsh-speaking people to the north, centred on Edinburgh, fighting for their survival against the Saxons of Northumbria.
The tragic war poem about their failure and slaughter, Y Goddodin, is considered one of the earliest Welsh poems; it’s classic, heroic-battle-against-the-odds stuff, though it perhaps didn’t help its three hundred heroes that they had spent a year getting drunk on mead before they finally went into battle. Although the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians were pushing the British or Celtic people back, there was no sense that one side was more cultured than the other. The heroes of Goddodin seem, as it happens, to have been Christians fighting pagans.
Does any of this matter much? Only because we need to shake up our ideas about what the very words ‘British’, ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ mean. This was a harried, violent and marginal archipelago in which the offer of Christianity spread remarkably fast because it promised a happy and tranquil life after death – a great alternative to the cold, dangerous and relatively short experience of life in Northumbria, or anywhere else.
But it would also be a mistake to think of Caedmon’s Britain as simply a wilderness of macho warlords. Note, for a start, that he answered not to a man, but to a woman – the abbess. For much of the Anglo-Saxon period, religious institutions for men and women existed side by side, with female religious leaders highly literate and, in their own way, powerful. Very little writing by them has survived, but we know enough to understand that in the world of the Church, at least, women could be as powerful as princesses. Second, from artworks that have survived, in gold hoards or the glorious illuminated manuscripts, we know that the Britain of Caedmon’s time had a highly developed artistic sense; its people valued intricacy, complexity and show-off display. Although in translation his hymn may seem simple enough to us, in the original Anglo-Saxon it was a dazzling weave of assonance and rhythm, as carefully wrought as a letter colourfully inscribed in the Lindisfarne Gospels.
So, what of the language itself? I’ve called it Anglo-Saxon, and that’s the term most scholars would use; but that’s a very loose description of something that was in fact written in a specific Northumbrian dialect.
The marvel of Caedmon, according to Bede, was that he could pour out poetry while being, by the standards of the day, an uneducated man. In other words, he didn’t speak Latin. Today we are used to thinking of Latin as the dry, dead, elite language of scholars and priests. Back then it was still the left-behind language of the Roman Empire, heard all over the place. In fact, it seems to have been more used in the west and the north than in the south.
Bede said Britain had five languages: English, by which he meant the Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon; British, close to what we would call Welsh; Irish; Pictish – another ancient British language from Scotland, now vanished; and Latin, which he said ‘is in general use among them all’.
Latin was the language of the monasteries; yet it is only thanks to the monasteries that we have any early English surviving at all. In fact a single book, presented to Exeter monastery around 1070, contains the single greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in a mishmash of Germanic dialects. This is a language which takes root for just long enough that it can’t be torn up again by the next wave of invaders, the Scandinavian Vikings; and it’s still buried inside the mouths of everyone who speaks modern English today.
Caedmon’s world, the great, humane monasteries of the north-east, would soon be obliterated. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the record for the year 793 reads:
Dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying into the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.
Eventually Caedmon’s tongue found its defender in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Meanwhile, the thread of human thought and communication ran mainly in Latin. Even the old British scripts used for cutting language into stone and onto slate, runes and ogam were simplified versions of Latin letters. So having no Latin in a monastery was, even for a cowherd, a huge disability. What was miraculous to Caedmon’s contemporaries was that he used the earthy, rhythmic old German way of making poetry and applied it directly to a religious subject.
I hope it’s obvious by now that Caedmon wouldn’t have thought of himself