CHAPTER FOUR
“[S]urge d[omi]ne [et] disepentur inimici tui et fugent qui oderunt te a facie tua”—
“Rise up, o Lord, and may Thy enemies be scattered and those who hate Thee flee from Thy face”
Folded almost in half and originally set with a now lost stone, a slender strip of gold alloy was one of the very few nonmilitary objects in the Staffordshire Hoard. At just over seven inches long and a little over half an inch wide, the gold strip is inscribed with a snake head and bears in clumsy lettering on both faces a misspelled biblical quotation—“surge d[omi]ne [et] disepentur inimici tui et fugent qui oderunt te a facie tua” (“Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be scattered and those who hate Thee flee from Thy face”). Viewed against the finely wrought cloisonné and glittering cut garnets, it would seem to be one of the hoard’s more modest pieces. Yet no single object in the hoard has attracted so much speculation and difference of opinion. Two small holes bored through the strip presumably allowed it to be attached to something else—suggestions range from a helmet to an ecclesiastical object—while the strip itself may have formed the arm of a cross. Finally, there is the question of what if anything can be gleaned from the choice of quotation.
“When he had lifted up the Ark Moses said, ‘Arise, O Lord, and let Thy enemies be scattered, and let those who hate Him flee before Him’ “; thus runs the text of Numbers 10:35, the direct source of the quotation. A very similar variant, however, is that of Psalm 67:2: “exsurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici eius et fugiant qui oderunt eum a facie eius” (“Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered, and let those who hate Him flee from before Him,” Psalm 68:1 in modern editions).
As a number of scholars were quick to point out, the psalm’s version would be the better known, given that the psalms were chanted daily in the monasteries; significantly, while the verse from Numbers does not appear in any ecclesiastical writings before the year 900, that of the psalm is found in a number of surviving works of the early church. And these early writings indicate that the Numbers/Psalm verses had at least one interesting and suggestive function. In the Life of Saint Anthony, which was translated into Latin (from the Greek of its author, Athanasius) around A.D. 370, Anthony retreats to the desert wilderness, where he is tempted by demons. Here, he “chanted that psalm inwardly: Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered, and let them that hate Him flee before His face,” and the demons were dispersed. This story of Anthony from late Roman times influenced a later and specifically Anglo-Saxon saintly “life,” the Life of Saint Guthlac, written around 740. The biography tells how Guthlac, also beset by demons, “sang the first verse of the sixty-seventh psalm as if prophetically, ‘Let God arise,’ etc.: when they had heard this, at the same moment, quicker than words, all the hosts of demons vanished like smoke from his presence.” As Brandon Hawk, the scholar who drew attention to this use, points out, these biographies of saints, or hagiographies, “present the psalm as a charm for warding off evil and achieving victory over the saints’ enemies.” The modest slip of gold, then, may have served the same kind of ritual function that scholars speculate for the two crosses also found in the hoard.
It is, however, not only the substance of the quotation on the gold strip, but also the fact of the writing itself, and the use of Latin, that is of interest. The Latin language was one of the great political and cultural legacies of Imperial Rome; it was also the language of learning and most particularly of the Catholic Church. (Even today Latin is the official language of the Vatican.)
Other systems of writing had also been known in Britain. As Tacitus had noted, the Germanic tribes on the Continent also had a system of reading lots, or divining the will of the gods, by marking strips of wood with “certain signs.” These “signs” may have been runes, the system of symbols widely used by the Germans, and thought to have been first brought by Angles to England. The earliest surviving continental examples are from the early second century, but the date and origin of the runic system is unknown; a source in the German/Danish borderlands seems likely, and individual symbols owe clear debts to the Latin alphabet. Famously, the runes were believed to have magical properties, as a story told by Bede makes evident: Mercians captured a Northumbrian nobleman and put him in chains. But as often as he was bound, the chains would become loosened and fall away, and at length his amazed captor asked him if he had any “magical Runes” that caused this. In Bede’s story, the miraculous loosening of the fetters turns out to have been the result of prayer, but the incident highlights what was evidently a widely known superstition.
Runes seem to have been mostly inscribed on wood; indeed, the angular character of the symbols may derive from the fact that they had to be carved. Descriptions of their use suggest that the magic did not reside in the symbols themselves, but in the spells and charms they inscribed. Runes were written in manuscripts, stamped on funerary pots, incised on jewelry, and carved decoratively onto a whalebone casket. One use in particular is striking: There are surviving Anglo-Saxon examples of the Scandinavian practice of inscribing runes on weapons, and one of the two known English examples of the entire 28-symbol runic alphabet appears on a seax, or single-edged sword, dredged from the Thames.
Widespread though the knowledge of runes seems to have been, the official language of politics, of business, of the church, indeed of everything that ran a kingdom, as well as of learning and scholarship, was Latin. In England, the caretaker of the Latin tongue, and therefore of literacy and learning in general, was the church. This was due not to any reverence for the humanities or education per se, but to the pragmatic need to have men who could read and give instruction in the Scriptures. In A Colloquy, Bishop Ælfric, who taught and wrote in the late tenth century, gives a vivid account of a dialogue between an instructor and his pupils:
RUNES
Scholars generally hold two views of runes. One is that they were a mystery script used for ritual purposes. The other is that they had a more general use in administration and communication, and the fact that most of them are found in ritual contexts—on amulets, funerary urns, and weapons—is an accident of survival. The word rune (Old English run) and words like it have meanings like “council” and “consultation,” which suggests that the alphabet was used in formal decision-making, but the same could be said of all writing. As well as having a sound value, each rune had a name: d was daeg, or “day,” and w was wynn, or “joy.” It appears that runes were developed for carving on wood, on which cutting straight lines is much easier than carving a curve. It also seems likely that the people who developed runes were familiar with the Latin alphabet. Runes continued to be used alongside the Roman alphabet throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Runes were used on small objects, as well as on more than 70 sculptured monuments.
Pupil: We children beg you, teacher, to show us how to speak Latin
correctly, for we are ignorant, and speak inaccurately.
Teacher: What do you want to talk about?
Pupil: What do we care what we talk about, if only it be correctly
spoken and useful, not trivial or base?
While the early English Church promoted the use of Latin as a necessary tool in its mission to propagate the Christian faith, the cultivation of the liberal arts—the great legacy of Greece and Rome—was the passionate and dedicated work of the Irish monasteries. Not only was the monastic scholarship of the highest order in Europe, but, remarkably, study of the sacred texts was combined with the works of secular writers such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, and Pliny.
In England, the church was keenly conscious of the seductive power of pagan poetry and stories, whether classical or, closer to home, Germanic. In what has been called “one of the most famous letters in Anglo-Saxon,” written in 797, Alcuin, renowned as a teacher as well as a scholar of high learning and a minister of education of sorts to Charlemagne, scolds Bishop Higbald of the Lindisfarne monastery, where dreadful rumor had it that the brethren had been listening not to grave sermons of the fathers of the church, but to heathen song:
The words of God should be read at the monks’ feasts. There the reader should be heard not a harpist, the discourses of the Fathers not the songs of the heathens. What has Ingeld to do with Christ? [Ingeld is a warrior who appears in both Scandinavian and Old English saga, including the poem Beowulf.] The house is narrow, it cannot contain both. The king of the heavens will have nothing to do with heathen and damned so-called kings. For the Eternal King rules in the heavens, the lost heathen repines in hell. The voices of readers should be heard in your houses, not the cackling of the crowd in the street.
One imagines the crestfallen faces of the rebuked monks who had enjoyed these recitals of heroic tales of derring-do in the remote quiet of their sanctuaries.
The “cackling” crowd obviously did not speak, let alone read, Latin. Their language was what we refer to today as Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, their Germanic tongue. The fact that the language of the church, as well as the language of education, was conducted in a tongue most of the populace could not understand would not necessarily have been problematic to the masses. After all, both Celtic and Germanic cultures, like many others, had long, venerated traditions of sacral languages, as preserved in song and verse. But one person who did find this disjunction undesirable was King Alfred—Alfred the Great—who, among his many accomplishments, was an educational reformer and a pioneering translator of Latin works. A biography of Alfred, written shortly after 893, describes the formative childhood of this Christian king and his early attraction to the stories of his own people:
His noble birth and noble nature implanted in him from his cradle a love of wisdom above all things, even amid all the occupations of this present life; but—with shame be it spoken!—by the unworthy neglect of his parents he remained illiterate till he was twelve years old or more, though by night and day he was an attentive listener to the Saxon poems which he often heard being recited.
In a well-known letter written to Bishop Wærferth in the late ninth century, Alfred himself describes how he came to his self-imposed task: “When I remembered how the knowledge of Latin had formerly decayed throughout England, and yet many could read English writing, I began, among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to translate into English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, and in English Shepherd’s Book sometimes word by word, and sometimes according to the sense.”
Alfred’s systematic educational reform saw the cultivation of instruction in reading and writing the English language. Fittingly, his biography, quoted above, is the first secular biography in English. Literary English had been used before this, in both poetry and prose, but not widely. According to tradition, the first English Christian poem was composed by Caedmon, a brother in the monastery at Whitby, who, according to Bede, “did not learn the art of poetry from men nor through a man but he received the gift of song freely by the grace of God.” Although his work was renowned in his lifetime, only one of his poems, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” has survived:
Now shall we praise the Prince of heaven,
The might of the Maker and his manifold thought,
The work of the Father: of what wonders he wrought
The Lord everlasting, when he laid out the worlds.
He first raised up for the race of men
The heaven as a roof, the holy Ruler.
Then the world below, the Ward of mankind,
As a home for man, the Almighty Lord.
The attested wide popularity of this modest work—17 copies of it survive—undoubtedly lay not only in its charm and freshness but also, as one scholar speculated, in the fact that Caedmon was the first to apply “Germanic heroic poetic discipline of vocabulary, style and general technique to Christian story and Christian edification.” The quotation above is itself a translation, from Old English into modern English; to appreciate its Germanic features, such as the alliteration and emphatic caesura, or pause, within each verse, the poem must be read in the original:
Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard
metudæs maecti end his modgidanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes
eci dryctin or astelidæ
He areist scop aelda barnum
heben til hrofe haleg scepen;
tha middungeard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmectig
This short poem reveals its Germanic character not only in its poetic technique but also in its vocabulary. Caedmon’s choice of word—middungeard, or “Middle Earth”—for the place under God’s heaven inhabited by man, is an echo of the old Nordic cosmological belief in nine worlds connected by a rainbow.
Like the first English poem, the first surviving English prose is a Christian work. The anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, generally dated between 698 to 705, or less than 20 years after the saint’s death, is believed to have been written by a monk of Lindisfarne Abbey, where Cuthbert had been bishop. In his preface to his great Ecclesiastical History, Bede refers to this work as a source for his own—“accepting the story I read in simple faith,” but also making it his business “to add with care what I was able to learn myself.” Bede himself later wrote two lives of this popular saint, one in prose and one in verse.
Despite their Christian subject matter, the Early English works resonate with the old heroic songs and sagas; as Alcuin’s indignant letter revealed, these were enjoyed and perpetuated within monastic walls, the very centers of English learning. Their popularity can be attributed in great part to the fact that men and women from the aristocracy accounted for so large and influential a part of the monastic populations—it is estimated that between the seventh and early eighth centuries, some 30 kings and queens entered monasteries, along with countless other men and women of noble birth, warriors, and court retainers. Heroic tales of warriors winning glory were the fare these monks of the nobility had learned as children, just as King Alfred had listened to the Saxon poems in his boyhood. In the many hagiographic works of this period, the saint becomes the “hero of God,” or “the warrior of the Lord,” performing prodigies of saintly deeds. When he was a boy, St. Guthlac was “in his father’s halls, trained in the noble traditions of his ancestors,” and later, “when his youthful strength had grown greater … he called to mind the mighty deeds of heroes of old and, like one roused from slumber he put aside his former disposition, gathered about him troops of followers, and took to a life of war.”
Along with this reverberation of Nordic heroic lore, Early English literature, and poetry in particular is infused with a melancholy yearning often attributed to the even older Celtic traditions still potent in the Irish monasteries, where so many churchmen of England had trained, especially in the late seventh century. Whether from a Celtic sense of loss, as is supposed, or a Germanic yearning for a now distant homeland, the melancholy is unmistakable, and often expressed in terms of exile: The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lamen—in all these poems, the speaker bares his or her soul to pour out a story of loss and grief. Says the forsaken heroine of The Wife’s Lament,
I am anxious with longing.
Dim are the dales, dark the hills tower,
Bleak the tribe-dwellings, with briars entangled,
Unblessed abodes. Here bitterly I have suffered
The faring of my lord afar. Friends there are on earth
Living in love, in lasting bliss,
While, wakeful at dawn, I wander alone
Under the oak-tree the earth-cave near.
Sometimes this melancholy nostalgia extends beyond the speaker’s own circumstances to the tragic panorama of bygone lives and times: “I cannot think why in the world/my mind does not darken when I brood on the fate/of brave warriors,” says the speaker ofThe Wanderer; “how they have suddenly/had to leave the mead-hall, the bold followers./So this world dwindles day by day,/and passes away.”
This melancholy, the awareness of the passing of an age, also infuses the heroic epic Beowulf, the masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, literature—and a work that represents the fusion of traditions and sensibilities that makes the Early English literary tradition so extraordinary. In story line, Beowulf is pure Nordic saga, a tale of the Geat, or Swedish, warrior Beowulf’s heroic feats, which culminate in the slaying of the swamp monster Grendel, of “Cain’s clan,” and of his mother. In the second part of the poem, the aged Beowulf is king of the Geats and confronts a dragon guarding a hoard of gold. Beowulf, praised for such virtues as truthfulness and devotion to justice, slays the dragon and, dying from his wounds, gives thanks to “the everlasting Lord of All,/to the King of Glory.” Thus, while the hero is Germanic, the misty bog atmosphere both Celtic and Nordic, the influence of the Roman Aeneid palpable, the Anglo-Saxon epic is shot through with Christian sensibilities.
King Alfred’s reformation of England’s educational system was given urgency by the damage inflicted on monastic centers by the Viking raids that mauled England from the end of the eighth century onward, exacerbating what had been a general decline in scholarship. The monasteries, with their well-known and undefended treasures, had been particular targets: Lindisfarne, for example, was sacked on June 8, 793. As part of his reform, Alfred invited distinguished scholars from the Continent to advise and educate the future English educators whose own standards of learning had slipped. Along with the many books that filled the great libraries before the catastrophic Viking raids, Alfred recalled, “there was also a great multitude of God’s servants, but they had very little knowledge of the books, for they could not understand anything of them, because they were not written in their own language.” It was Alfred’s belief that the Vikings were God’s way of punishing his people for their neglect of his word. While the cultivation of Latin in the church was encouraged, Alfred set forth a visionary new program:
Therefore it seems better to me … for us also to translate some books which are most needful for all men to know into the language which we can all understand, and for you to do as we very easily can if we have tranquility enough, that is, that all the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well: and let those be afterwards taught more in the Latin language who are to continue in learning, and be promoted to higher rank.
Alfred’s initiative was the beginning of a long process of transformation, but by the end of the ninth century English was beginning to replace Latin as the language of law and business and was used for official documents including wills and charters. This widespread use of the vernacular in England and Ireland was, before the 12th century, unique in Europe.
According to Caesar, as we’ve seen, the Druids did not commit their traditions and lore to writing “since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory.” As the Druids had feared, the spread of literacy and books did indeed erode those traditions that had been born and shaped by memory, the many orally transmitted songs and poems that had celebrated and preserved the old heroic values—songs as old as those heard by Tacitus centuries ago, before Germanic tribes had crossed the sea to Britain. Few of these Germanic poems survive, the Christian monks and monastic-based scholars being, perhaps understandably, uninterested in the recording of heathen verse.
On the other hand, the potency of the written word had been manifested even in resolutely oral cultures—how else to account for the Druidic use of “symbols” to divine the will of god or fate, or the runic inscriptions determinedly etched on burial goods and weapons, and, possibly, on crosses?“[S]urge d[omi]ne [et] disepentur inimici tui et fugent qui oderunt te a facie tua”—“Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be scattered and those who hate Thee flee from Thy face”: Do the belligerent words on the strip of gold found in the Staffordshire Hoard, then, represent some early faith in the literal magic of the written word?
THE POWER OF WRITING
Among the Staffordshire Hoard’s many notable objects, one of the most intriguing is a strip of metal bearing a biblical inscription, powerful words of great meaning to the people who commissioned them. Many existing inscriptions from Anglo-Saxon England show how much importance was attached to the written word. Prior to the advent of Christianity in England, writing took the form of Germanic runes, used by the Anglo-Saxons for short, often obscure, inscriptions on such things as brooches and pots. Most likely created by people familiar with the Roman alphabet, runes were used in northern Europe around the fourth century A.D. The letters were made up of short, straight lines, ideal for cutting onto wood, stone, or other hard materials. As Christianity is a religion of the book with great emphasis on the written word, St. Augustine’s proselytizing mission to Britain in A.D. 597 promoted the Roman alphabet. Within a few years of his arrival, the Anglo-Saxons were producing their own books, their designs fusing with those of their Irish neighbors to give us the wonders of insular art, represented by the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Book of Chad.
People continued using runes long after the introduction of the Roman alphabet. The eighth-century stone cross from Ruth-well, Dumfriesshire, bears, in runes, part of the great Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood.” An eighth-century seax, or single-edged sword, found in the River Thames bears, on one of its sides, a futhorc, or runic alphabet, known from its opening letters: F – U – Th – O – F – C. Its owner may have believed that these letters represented the basis of all written texts, including the Bible. The inscription on a tenth-century seax from Sittingbourne is more down-to-earth; on one side, written in Old English using Roman letters, are the words, “Sigebereht owns me.” On the other side are the words “Biorthelme made me,” an early example of product branding. 
LIFE IN A MONASTERY
The life of a medieval monk, following St. Benedict’s regulations of A.D. 529, was one of chastity, poverty, and extreme obedience. Monks spoke no word but prayer, ate tasteless foods, and lived a rigorous daily life enclosed in walls. Prayers began at two in the morning and ended at sunset, with services every three hours between. Otherwise, monks were either at hard physical work or copying the words of religious texts, if not writing works of their own. Their main meal, lunch, consisted of bland fare such as poached fish or gruel. They were not permitted to leave the compound without permission of the abbot, and they could not own property or send or receive letters from home.
What was the appeal of such an existence?
Life in a monastery was strict and hard, but in a troubled and transient world everyone’s prime concern was to save his soul from hell. Monks and nuns were drawn almost exclusively from the aristocracy, although we do see a few exceptions such as the poet Caedmon. Kings like Sigeberht and Aethelred of Mercia retired to monasteries, which played a vital role in protecting a kingdom. The Viking raids were seen as God’s punishment. In response, Alfred sought to reform the church and improve the level of religious training so that God would protect his people. An odd feature of Anglo-Saxon monasteries was the existence of double houses, which contained both monks and nuns, living parallel but separate lives under the control of an abbess. Not all monasteries were equally valued; in his letter to Egberht of York, Bede criticizes the low standards of some, which were, in effect, aristocratic households disguised as monasteries to avoid taxes.
Monasteries became the centers of education and progressive thinking. Some of them were very rich, with massive landholdings and noted craftsmen and -women. Many failed to survive the Viking onslaught and had to be refounded, sometimes after the Norman Conquest.
BEOWULF
Beowulf is an epic story of a great hero who defeats fearsome foes and eventually dies in battle against the last of them. The 3,182-line poem takes us back to another world, similar to the world that produced the Staffordshire Hoard. Although the date of the poem’s composition has been much debated, it was likely written down in the later eighth or early ninth century. While clearly Anglo-Saxon, it is set in Scandinavia and, despite Christian elements, reflects a pagan world, perhaps of the sixth century.
Hrothgar, king of the Danes, having gained glory and reputation in battle, builds Heorot, a magnificent mead hall. The sounds of happiness and celebration attract the attention of Grendel, a monster “descended from Cain,” who each night raids the hall, killing and kidnapping men to his den in the fens. Beowulf, a Geat from what is now southern Sweden, hears of this horror and, with his chosen companions, sails to Denmark to destroy the monster. Weaponless, he waits for Grendel, who, on arriving, kills and eats a man. Beowulf is to be next. As he catches Grendel in his iron grip, warriors rush to his aid. The monster is proof against their swords but not against Beowulf’s strength: Beowulf tears Grendel’s arm from his shoulder. Dying, the fiend flees back to his den. The celebration of this deliverance is cut short by the arrival of Grendel’s mother, seeking vengeance for her son. Called on to remove the new menace, Beowulf dives deep into a pool and kills her. He then returns to the Geats and is crowned king. He rules for 50 years until someone steals a golden cup from a hoard guarded by a dragon. Enraged, the dragon starts to burn the Geats’ land, and the aged Beowulf once more is called to action. In the ensuing battle, both he and the dragon die.
What does this remarkable poem tell us about the Staffordshire Hoard? It is full of references to the objects the hoard comprises—swords, spears, helmets, and treasure—and, not surprisingly, shows their great importance to Anglo-Saxon aristocrats. It also tells of loyalty, the relationship between a warrior and his lord, and the rewards given and promises made in the mead hall. Most important, Beowulf tells of deposits of treasure guarded from an older age.