A short history of social life in England. Margaret Bertha Synge
it would seem, ranked only as nicknames, which our ancestors loved. Thus we get a glimpse of Tata (the lively one), Enede (the duck), and Elfgifu (the gift of the fairies).
Marriage now became a religious ceremony, performed at the church door and sanctioned by the blessing of the priest, while cremation in any form was forbidden, and burial took place in consecrated ground. Men's eyes were opened for the first time to the evils of slavery. Though there were different degrees at this time, yet all slaves alike were the property of a master, against whose cruelty there was no redress, neither had they any kinsmen to avenge their wrongs. They were bought and sold with the land as if they had been sheep or cattle. Now it was ordained that they, with the rest of humanity, should rest on Sundays and feast days, and further, that their lives should be protected, in so much as a man who slew his slave was to do penance for two years, and the woman who, in a rage, beat her slave to death should do penance for seven years.
These penances, or fasts, played a very large part in the social life of this period. They must have been a very real trial to the Anglo-Saxon community, whose old ideal of material enjoyment can hardly have passed entirely. Severe indeed sounds the penance ordered to such as these. Each clause seems intended to mortify to the full the peculiar vanities of these men of old. To expiate sin, they must lay aside all weapons and walk bare-foot, nor must they take shelter at nightfall. They must fast and watch and pray day and night, weary though they be. They must take no warm bath, cut no hair or nails, touch no flesh, drink no ale or mead, enter no church, but just grieve continually for sin.
The possibility of redeeming these penances was one of the first abuses that shadowed the purity of the movement By building a church or bridging a river, by helping the widow or fatherless or freeing a slave, wealthy men could redeem their punishments.
It is illuminating to look at the capital sins that demanded these fasts in greater or less degree. They were pride, vainglory, envy, anger, despondency, avarice, greediness and luxury. Perhaps the quaintest is the fifth on the list, by which a man who permitted his want of liveliness to damp the cheerfulness of another was ordered to fast for a day on bread and water, though, be it noted, even this small penance was redeemable by the payment of a silver penny or the hurried repetition of many psalms!
But perhaps one of the strangest phases that passed over the social life of the English people at this time was the renunciation of the world for monastic life as an expression of the highest Christian obedience, a phase so important in its results that it requires some attention. Long ago the Celtic population had realised the value of the monastery. On storm-beaten shores and wind-swept islands little settlements had arisen, in which many a devoted monk had spent his self-denying life of prayer and meditation. But it was not till the Benedictine monks had won over the main body of English by their example of high living, as much as by their teaching, that monastic life became at all universal in England.
To the monks of early England we owe all our most precious treasures in literature as well as in art. Can our country ever forget the old monk of Jarrow, the father of English learning, and the ideal of the divinity of work which he put before his people? Who but the monks translated the Latin prayers into Saxon and illuminated the Saxon Gospels, adorning the margins with virgins and apostles in Anglo-Saxon dress playing on Anglo-Saxon instruments? They were our keenest agriculturists, our most skilful fishermen, our best informed gardeners, our earliest doctors. They reclaimed the waste land, they cut the virgin forests: no labour was too hard, no toil too rough for these servants of God. The monastery was not only a school of learning: it was at once a shelter for the destitute and a refuge for the sick, from whose hospitable doors no stranger was ever turned away. The monks were the only doctors in the land, but unhappily their knowledge was not equal to their enthusiasm. Hitherto the people had trusted to charms and incantations, magic and witchcraft, to cure them of their ills. A strange mingling of monkish knowledge and superstition now took place. Here is an early prescription for the cure of consumption:—"Take thrift-grass, betony, penny-grass, fane, fennel, Christmas wort and borage, and make them into a potion with clear ale. Sing seven Masses over the plants daily, add holy water, and drink the draught out of the church bell, while the priest sings: 'Domini sancti Pater omnipotens.'"
Bleeding was the favourite remedy for most disorders, but generally so clumsily performed as to be more dangerous than the disease itself. Its efficacy was supposed to depend on the day of the month on which it was performed, and was prohibited "when the light of the moon and the tide of the ocean were increasing."
Such very briefly was the state of things in England, when once again—so strangely does history repeat itself—a pagan population of sea-loving men poured themselves over our islands from beyond the wild North Sea From Scandinavia and Iceland and the Baltic shores they came, and, emerging from a background of wild legend and grim saga, we recognise their kinship with the Angles and Saxons. Call them Vikings or Northmen, Norsemen or Danes, they have practically the same manners and customs, the same language and social order, the same gods, the same Walhalla and Hel, as those tribes which had peopled the island some three hundred years before them. Perhaps their strenuous struggle for bare existence and the uncompromising climate of their northern homes made them appear even more fierce, more sturdy, and more relentless than their predecessors in the land. Through the long dim ages of a thousand years we see again the famous black raven ensigns flying from their long narrow galleys, their weather-beaten faces of stern determination as they catch sight of the shores of England; again we hear snatches of their native sagas and their shouts of victory as they return successful from their wild plunder parties, leaving devastated lands and blackened ruins behind them.
"Let all folk do general penance," cried the distracted priests, "for three days on bread and water; let every man come barefoot to church without ornament, and at eventide let all the assembly on bended knees before God's altar sing the third Psalm, till the Almighty pity us and grant us to overcome our enemy. God help us." But in their enthusiasm the Christian teachers had implored the English to abstain from that ceaseless warfare that had characterised them of old, till they had lost much of their skill. In addition to this, though alarm-fires blazed from every hill to summon the village fyrd to war, yet the freemen of England were now agriculturists and not warriors, and they regretfully passed from their newly turned furrows to grasp the unfamiliar spear and shield as they hastened—an undisciplined force—to meet the foe.
Armed from head to foot were the Danes, every man of them a well-drilled soldier, a fierce fighter, and thirsting for the blood of his enemy. Merciless but well ordered were their attacks, aimed more especially against the wealthy monasteries of the land. Priests were slain as they knelt at prayer, monks and nuns were pitilessly slaughtered, children were torn from their mothers to be tortured and killed. Never were the Danes more elated than when they were sacking a rich religious house or burning a little church. At last England lay disheartened, dreary, devastated, and the Danes triumphantly possessed themselves of their new homes. Then, as the clash of battle died away, once more a new country arose on the blackened ruins of the past. Though the outer semblances of Christianity had been swept away, the new faith was strong enough to produce martyrs, such as St. Edmund, as well as to hold the new-comers within its almighty grip. When the storm clouds had been dispelled, behold "England was England still; the conquerors sank quietly into the mass of those around them, and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ."
New churches arose, important monasteries were founded, a reconstruction of the army took place, a new impulse was given to learning; but what transcends all else in the material importance of the moment was the inauguration of the British navy. Whether that love of the sea has come to Englishmen through Saxon or Dane is ever a matter of mild dispute. Most of the effects of the Danish settlement in England have been merely the accentuation of those already existing characteristics bequeathed by their predecessors. If family life had been cherished by the Anglo-Saxon people, it was yet more closely united by bonds of blood among the Danes; if freedom had been the watchword of the first comers, intensely free was the existence of the liberty loving Scandinavian; if devotion to Woden insisted on human sacrifice under the old régime, yet more persistently bloodthirsty were the pagan hordes of the ninth century.
But the inhuman and pitiless brutality of the age was now illumined for ever by the radiance of that light shed over England