Saxon Chronicles Quotes

He was a mild man, and gentle and good, and did no justice. [Said of King Stephen, 1135-1154.]

In the space of a few, bright years, something new stirred in this land; something unprecedented; something wonderful; and men, being men, perceived it with stunned awe and then, being men, destroyed it without thought, for being new and strange.

I had broken three Saxon shield-walls and buried Hywelbane to her hilt in my country’s enemies before I had been elected to Mithras’s service, but all Lancelot had ever done was boast and posture.

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots.

Slaves, women, blacks, Hispanics, gays—you’d think the aging white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men that run this country would have figured it out by now. Same pattern, same template, same stupidity applied to some other minority. They say that how you treat those most vulnerable and powerless in society either validates or condemns your morals. It should be clear by now that this country is morally bankrupt.

In this manner, according to the Saxon Chronicles, Boston, St. Botolph's Town, the capital of the Fens, came into existence. It was originally a desert piece of ground given to St. Botolph by Ethelmund, King of the South Angles, as a site for a monastery. The monastery built, the people gathered around and the settlement grew, till finally it assumed the proportions of a town, then of a city. St. Edmundsbury and many other towns and cities in England came into existence in a similar manner.

For example, the version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, known as the Parker Chronicle,2 states that from the beginning of the world until the year AD 6 were 5200 years. The Laud Chronicle,3 differs slightly from this, stating that the same period elapsed from the Creation to the year AD 11, indicating either a simple scribal error or a derivation from two distinct sources. However, both chronicles agree that from the Creation to the year AD 33, the year of the Crucifixion, was a period of 5226 years. In other words, as far as the Saxons were concerned, the world was created about 5200 BC.

Then he died; and Ceawlin, his son, succeeded, who reigned seventeen years. Then he died; and Ceol succeeded to the government, and reigned five years.

First we have the tract of Gildas, upon whom the gratitude of the Middle Ages bestowed the title of “the Wise”. The tract was written in approximately A.D. 545, and therefore a hundred years after the curtain fell between Britannia and the Continent. Nearly two hundred years later the Venerable Bede, whose main theme was the history of the English Church, lets fall some precious scraps of information, outside his subject, about the settlement itself. A compilation known as the Historia Britonum contains some documents earlier than Bede. Finally, in the ninth century, and very likely at the direction of King Alfred, various annals preserved in different monasteries were put together as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

come overland from the Atlantic Ocean: a tide, a wash, a thrice flux-and-ebb of motion so rapid and quick across the land’s slow alluvial chronicle as to resemble the limber flicking of the magician’s one hand before the other holding the deck of inconstant cards: the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second, half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer, the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whisky, Bible and jug in one hand and (like as not) a native tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent not through viciousness but simply because of his over-revved glands; uxorious and polygamous: a married invincible bachelor, dragging his gravid wife and most of the rest of his mother-in-law’s family behind him into the trackless infested forest, spawning that child as like as not behind the barricade of a rifle-crotched log mapless leagues from nowhere and then getting her with another one before reaching his

Domesday was a good word for it. Twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, William sent out his officers to take stock of his kingdom. The monks of Peterborough were still recording the events of history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and they noted, disapprovingly, that not one piece of land escaped the survey, ‘not even an ox or a cow or a pig’. William claimed all.

A.D. 867. This year the army went from the East-Angles over the mouth of the Humber to the Northumbrians, as far as York. And there was much dissension in that nation among themselves; they had deposed their king Osbert, and had admitted Aella, who had no natural claim. Late in the year, however, they returned to their allegiance, and they were now fighting against the common enemy; having collected a vast force, with which they fought the army at York; and breaking open the town, some of them entered in. Then was there an immense slaughter of the Northumbrians, some within and some without; and both the kings were slain on the spot. The survivors made peace with the army. The same year died Bishop Ealstan, who had the bishopric of Sherborn fifty winters, and his body lies in the town.

But the Chronicle for Æthelred’s reign was written after its disastrous conclusion,

from 980 onwards the Chronicle reports attacks on various towns and monasteries around the south coast.

writing in 731, a century and a half before the Chronicle

Lindesfarona). In the ninth century, the West Saxon text known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle added another more recent king to this list and gave these imperium-holders the title of Bretwalda or Brytenwalda (meaning either ‘wide-ruler’ or ‘Britain-ruler’). Under King Alfred and his successors in the tenth century, the

the early part of the Chronicle was written by a Mercian, who left some dialect fingerprints on the West Saxon text.

It was some fifty years before the first waves of Angles and Jutes arrived (449, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), another twenty-five before the South Saxons came (477), and nearly twenty years later before the West Saxons did (495). A lot can happen to pronunciation in a hundred years.

The tree of life motif is especially prominent in the medieval poem “The Dream of the Rood.” Probably first written in the late seventh or early eighth century, the extant version of this Anglo-Saxon epic poem was discovered among a collection of other Old English religious literature in the Cathedral library at Vercelli in northern Italy. The text recounts the Passion from the cross’s point of view, making it the chronicler of its own story, starting from its youth as a green sapling, and concluding with its being hewn down and fashioned into the instrument of crucifixion.

and what the Chronicle and Alcuin were describing was the earliest datable viking raid on Britain.

this year,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 794, ‘Offa, king of the Mercians, had Æthelberht beheaded.

The works of other eighth-century chroniclers are pitifully thin compared to those written by Bede,

The staff of the First Class à la carte restaurant were having the hardest time of all. They were neither fish nor fowl. Obviously they weren’t passengers, but technically they weren’t crew either. The restaurant was not run by the White Star Line but by Monsieur Gatti as a concession. Thus, the employees had no status at all. And to make matters worse, they were French and Italian—objects of deep Anglo-Saxon suspicion at a time like this in 1912. From the very start they never had a chance. Steward Johnson remembered seeing them herded together down by their quarters on E Deck aft. Manager Gatti, his Chef and the Chefs Assistant, Paul Maugé, were the only ones who made it to the Boat Deck. They got through because they happened to be in civilian clothes; the crew thought they were passengers.

Historian Bill Cooper’s research in After the Flood provides dates from several ancient cultures.9 The first is that of the Anglo-Saxons, whose history has 5,200 years from creation to Christ, according to the Laud and Parker Chronicles. Cooper’s research also indicated that Nennius’ record of the ancient British history has 5,228 years from creation to Christ. The Irish chronology has a date of about 4000 b.c. for creation, which is surprisingly close to Ussher and Jones! Even the Mayans had a date for the Flood of 3113 b.c.

Remarkably, this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (as it was later known) was written not in Latin, as was the practice in virtually every other literate corner of Europe, but in the everyday language that people spoke. By the end of the tenth century, this language had a name for the new state: it was ‘the land of the Angles’, Engla lond.4

No one can say exactly when the process of combining the different historical, legendary, and mythic elements into a Volsung cycle began, but it was probably at an early date. By the ninth century the legends of the Gothic Jormunrek and those of the destruction of the Burgundians had already been linked in Scandinavia, where the ninth-century “Lay of Ragnar” by the poet Bragi the Old treats both subjects. Bragi’s poem describes a shield on which a picture of the maiming of Jormunrek was either painted or carved and refers to the brothers Hamdir and Sorli from the Gothic section of the saga as “kinsmen of Gjuki,” the Burgundian father of King Gunnar. The “Lay of Ragnar” has other connections with the Volsung legend. The thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson identifies the central figure of the lay, whose gift inspired the poem in his honor, with Ragnar Hairy Breeches, a supposed ancestor of the Ynglings, Norway’s royal family. Ragnar’s son-in-law relationship to Sigurd through his marriage to Sigurd’s daughter Aslaug (mentioned earlier in connection with stave church carvings) is reflected in the sequence of texts in the vellum manuscript: The Saga of the Volsungs immediately precedes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar’s saga, in turn, is followed by Krákumál (Lay of the Raven), Ragnar’s death poem, in which Ragnar, thrown into the snakepit by the Anglo-Saxon King Ella, boasts that he will die laughing. The Volsung and Ragnar stories are further linked by internal textual references. It is likely that the The Saga of the Volsungs was purposely set first in the manuscript to serve as a prelude to the Ragnar material. The opening section of Ragnar’s saga may originally have been the ending of The Saga of the Volsungs. Just where the division between these two sagas occurs in the manuscript is unclear. Together these narratives chronicle the ancestry of the Ynglings—the legendary line (through Sigurd and Ragnar) and the divine one (through Odin). Such links to Odin, or Wotan, were common among northern dynasties; by tracing their ancestry through Sigurd, later Norwegian kings availed themselves of one of the greatest heroes in northern lore. In so doing, they probably helped to preserve the story for us.” (Jesse Byock)

Saxon Chronicle, ‘except what was in captivity to the Danish men’.13 So he seems to have felt himself, inspired by Bede’s History. He referred to his people not as Saxons but as ‘Angelcynn’ – ‘Englishkind’ – a term first used in Mercia. Their language was ‘Englisc’. Alfred, at first described in royal charters and on coins as rex Saxonum, duly became rex Angul-Saxonum in recognition of the union of Mercia and Wessex. He pursued a policy of what today we might term nation-building: ‘he sought to persuade [his subjects] that he was restoring the English, whereas, albeit following a model provided by Bede, he was inventing them’.14 He commanded a law code combining the customs of Wessex, Mercia and Kent and decked out with biblical teachings and Church laws – an important symbol of unity and status more than an instrument of rule, as in practice most law was oral and customary – ‘folk right’. He sent English coins to succour the poor of Rome. He wanted to increase Christian piety so as to ward off divine punishment in the form of Viking invasion,

Man and the rat are utterly destructive. All that nature offers is taken for their own purposes, plant or beast. Gradually these two have spread across the earth, keeping pace with each other and unable to destroy each other, though continually hostile. They have wandered from East to West, driven by their physical needs, and—unlike any other species of living things—have made war upon their own kind. The gradual, relentless, progressive extermination of the black rat by the brown has no parallel in nature so close as that of the similar extermination of one race of man by another. Did the Danes conquer England; or the Normans the Saxon-Danes; or the Normans the Sicillian-Mohammedans; or the Moors the Latin-Iberians; or the Franks the Moors; or the Spanish the Aztecs and the Incas; or the Europeans in general the aborigines of the world by qualities other than those by which Mus decumanus has driven out Mus rattus? In both species, the battle has been pitilessly to the strong. And the strong have been pitiless. The physically weak have been driven before the strong—annihilated, or constrained to the slavery of doing without the bounties which were provided for all equally. Isolated colonies of black rats survive, as weaker nations survive until the stronger ones desire the little they still possess. The rat has an excuse. As far as we know, it does not appear to have developed a soul, or that intangible quality of justice, mercy, and reason that psychic evolution has bestowed upon man. We must not expect too much.

Alfred, however, went a step farther than Charlemagne. He encouraged the development of literature in the language of the people. He “wondered extremely that the good and wise men who were formerly all over England, and had learned perfectly all the books, did not wish to translate them into their own language.” So he himself translated into Anglo-Saxon Orosius’ History, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and Pope Gregory Pastoral Charge. The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle is the oldest historical work written in a modern language, if we may regard Anglo-Saxon as the first stage of the English language.