2 It is a singular circumstance that our neighbours have preserved the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our mutilated term of England, for they write it with antiquarian precision, Angle-terre—the land of the Angles. Our counties bear the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native Britons, as our pious Camden ejaculates, “by God’s wonderful providence.”
3 The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.
Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected it to 800. Holinshed says about 800. Speed gives a much later date, 819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded conjectures.
4 Mitford’s “Harmony of Language,” 429. I might have placed this possible circumstance in the article “A History of Events which have not happened,” in “Curiosities of Literature.”
5 Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in the curious volume of his recondite discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.
6 “History of the World,” 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our own nation in venerable Lambarde’s “Perambulations of Kent,” 349, 453.
THE ANGLO-SAXONS.
The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there a people first assumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.
The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen; the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long neglected—in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems often to have been to them “the land of promise.” The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation, were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.
But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned Archbishop Matthew Parker, who was the first to attempt their restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas Walsingham’s History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this king’s secretary, Asser, printed in the Saxon character; we are told, as “an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an acquaintance with the handwriting of their ancestors.”1 “The invitation” was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! Spelman, the great legal archæologist, was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to the study; and his “Glossary” is too humble a title for that treasure of law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the learned world at home and abroad—while the unsold copies during the life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned Somner; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted lore. Hickes, in his elaborate “Thesaurus,” displayed a literature which had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read. These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary Rowe Mores expresses it, “unsightly to politer eyes.” A lady—and she is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient language of our country—Mrs. Elstob, the niece of Hickes, patronised by a celebrated Duchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly to disappear from our literature.
None of our historians from Milton to Hume ever referred to an original Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record the polity which had once constituted their lost independence. The annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England. Milton, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, or Octarchy, would be as worthless “to chronicle as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air.” Thus a poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired—this was less pardonable in a philosopher; and when Hume observed, perhaps with the eyes of Milton, that “he would hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon Annals,” however cheering to his reader was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly unconscious that these “obscure and uninteresting annals of the Anglo-Saxons” formed of themselves a complete history, offering new results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we track Burke in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our elegant antiquary, Bishop Percy, lamenting the scanty and defective annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and conjecture.
We find Ellis and Ritson still erring in the trackless paths. All this national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere,