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History of England in 25 Poems

A History of England in 25 Poems

Catherine Clarke

With illustrations by Edward

Bettison

ALLEN LANE an imprint of

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1. Beginnings 1 ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ (around 730)

2. Vikings 13 Extract from The Battle of Maldon (around 1000)

3. Conquest and Resistance 25 ‘The Death of King William’ from the Peterborough Chronicle (around 1087)

4. Anarchy: The Land Torn Apart 37 ‘Who Will Give Me a Fountain of Tears’ by Henry of Huntingdon (around 1146)

5. Mice, Monks and ‘Merry England’ 49 ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ (around 1260)

6. What Women Want 63 Extract from ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer (probably 1390s)

7. Love and Loss in a Time of Plague 79 Extract from Pearl (around 1390)

8. Once More unto the Breach: Neighbours and Adversaries 95 ‘Agincourt Carol’ (1415)

9. Anne Boleyn and All That 109 ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ by Thomas Wyatt (around 1520s)

10. Words for Burning 121 ‘The Ballad Which Anne Askew Made and Sang When She Was in Newgate’ by Anne Askew (1546)

11. Poetry, Prophecy and the Island 137 ‘This England’ (John of Gaunt’s Speech) from Richard II by William Shakespeare (around 1595)

12. The Arse-End of England 151 ‘Bum-fodder, or, Waste-paper, Proper to Wipe the Nation’s RUMP with, or Your Own’ attributed to Alexander Brome (1660)

13. Out of the Ashes: Making the Metropolis 167 Extract from Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden (1667)

14. Below Stairs in the Country House 183 Extract from ‘Crumble-Hall’ by Mary Leapor (around 1745)

15. From Africa to New England to England: A Voice for Freedom 195 ‘To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth’ by Phillis Wheatley (1773)

16. Contemplation of the Dust: England in Ruins 211 Extract from Eighteen Hundred and Eleven by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1812)

17. Under the Wheels of Progress 225 Extract from ‘The Cry of the Children’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1842)

18. You’ll Be a Man, My Son 239 ‘Rules and Regulations’ by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1845)

19. Queen Victoria’s Book: Science, Nature and Faith 253 Extract from In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850)

20. The History of a Moment 265 ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas (1917)

21. Modernity, Mourning and the Shadow of War 279 ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden (1936 and 1937)

22. Poetry after Auschwitz 293 ‘September Song’ by Geoffrey Hill (1968)

23. North–South Divide 305 ‘England’s Glory’ by Fleur Adcock (1986)

24. Winds of Change 319 ‘Hurricane Hits England’ by Grace Nichols (1996)

25. Green 333 ‘The Groundsman’ by Zaffar Kunial (2022)

Introduction

I’m sitting in the Rare Books room of the Library at Senate House, University of London, where I’ve handled so many remarkable materials during my research for this book. Today, I’m reading Rump Songs, an original 1662 collection of Royalist satirical poems against the short-lived English Republic, including the memorably scatological ballad ‘Bum-fodder’ (skim on to Chapter 12 if you’re curious). It’s a decorative little volume, bound in gilt calf-skin, with a handsome engraved title page. And then, as I turn to the last pages of the book, there’s a tiny, twisty hole burrowed through.

Pasted inside the front cover, there’s a label from Maggs Bros. of London – one of the oldest antiquarian booksellers in the world, established in 1853 – noting ‘a wormhole through some leaves at the end’. It’s a rambling, sinuous tunnel, where the larva of some insect (not technically a worm at all) has munched its way. I hold it up to the light (avoiding eye contact with the Special Collections librarian) and can see straight through from page 183 to the endpapers. It reminds me of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, on my children’s bookshelves at home. And I think of the earliest reference to a ‘bookworm’ in English poetry: a riddle written down in the tenth century, which castigates those greedy readers who devour endless words but remain ‘no whit the wiser’. I hope I’m faring better. Most of all, though, I think of pages and wormholes – in the sciencefiction sense – and how books have that unique power to transport us, instantly, to other places and points far distant in time. Poems, most especially, have the power to open a direct portal between us and moments in the past. Poems aren’t just a bridge to the events of history, but into the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those people living and breathing through it. It’s an astonishing fact – as audacious and thrilling as any interstellar

Introduction

fantasy. Poetry can shortcut time and distance, connecting us immediately, intimately, with individuals, their feelings and their worlds. This is a history book with a difference. Twenty-five poems, written between the eighth century and today, take us with them on time travel into England’s past. They take us inside history. The poem Queen Victoria read after the death of Albert, which tries to make sense of new scientific knowledge alongside religious faith and consolation. Guerrilla poetry written in English after 1066, holding William the Conqueror to account. Verse which takes us ‘below stairs’ in an eighteenth-century country house – penned by a housemaid dismissed for scribbling when she should have been turning the spit. Summer birdsong at a deserted railway station and the ghosts of the Great War. The wheels of Victorian industry and a tragedy in a coalmine. Voices from inside a medieval pandemic and the lived experience of the Black Death. A box of matches and the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Each poem opens a doorway into the past, revealing England’s history in new and often surprising ways.

From major historical events to individual lives in times of great change and turmoil; from familiar and well-loved poems to littleknown texts from the archive, each chapter takes us into a particular historical moment: the events, ideas, emotions and everything that’s at stake. You can dip in, finding poems which catch your eye or historical periods that appeal to you. Or start now, with the present day and the lush high-summer cricket field of Zaffar Kunial’s ‘The Groundsman’, and read backwards, peeling away layers of history. Better still, read the chapters in sequence, making your way from the Saxons through to post-Brexit Britain: follow stories of Englishness as they are gradually crafted and reshaped, and listen in on conversations between poems which unfold over centuries. Each chapter is an immersive exploration of a specific point in time. Poems are never just neutral observers. They are involved, engaged, partisan – they have skin in the game. Poems can be rebels, provocateurs and double agents. They leave us one half of a dynamic dialogue with their own rich and complex present: the impression of a vanished moment in words on a page.

Introduction

Why the history of England ? Why focus on just this one national narrative from the many identities and stories of our north Atlantic archipelago? I’m wary of complicity with practices of writing ‘British’ history which, all too often, erase and elide the cultural diversity and complexity of the many nations and communities within these islands. They have their own rich heritages and poetic traditions. And, above all, the poems I’ve chosen for this collection make their own compelling case for a legible history of England in verse.

From the very earliest writing to the present day, we can trace poetic traditions and images which shape a distinctive imaginary of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’. Think of the words of the verses known as ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake, most familiar today in the hymn setting by Sir Hubert Parry. The poem’s vision of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ has resonated through two centuries: an idealised English pastoral, fusing the character of the nation with its landscape, those ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’. Sung annually at the Last Night of the Proms, adopted by various English sports as an unofficial anthem, featured in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, and invoked regularly by politicians of all persuasions, the ‘green and pleasant land’ has become a powerful emblem for England. But, as we’ll see, that imagery doesn’t begin with Blake. He’s drawing on a poetic tradition going back a further thousand years and more, cultivating narratives of national identity out of the green hills and fields of the land itself.

England’s green radiates through the 1300 years of poetry and history in this book. But there are other patterns in this poetry of Englishness, too, stretching back to some of our very first surviving instances of the English language. Uses of nostalgia, mythologies of greatness, burnished images of honour, fair play and ‘stiff upper lip’, expressions of whimsy and playfulness. Poetry has always been intimately involved in forming ideas of English identity – and in troubling it, too. Over a thousand years, we can see how images and stories of England are shaped and deployed: ambitions, dreams and monsterings; lines of dissent and resistance.

Often strikingly self-conscious about their place in this tradition,

Introduction

poems speak back and forwards to each other over the centuries. While the poems in this book are set out in chronological order, a history of England through poetry disrupts a strict linear timeline. As well as twenty-five specific historical moments, these poems represent texts and conversations entangled across time. We’ll witness how people can make poems do what they wish: how lines can be used to speak and signify in different historical moments and for different purposes. Authors don’t have the monopoly on meaning; that’s something interpreted – and often contested – between readers within and across time.

We’ll encounter imagery of England as the ‘island nation’ or ‘sceptred isle’, stealthily conflating geography with destiny and erasing other countries and communities within Britain. Reading poems with political agendas and ambitions, we’ll be alert to the ways they can make words – and geography – work to their own ends. But, of course, we read these poems with an understanding that the stories of England and its nearest neighbours have always been interwoven. It’s not always possible – or desirable – to untwine a completely separate, uniquely ‘English’ history.

You certainly don’t have to be a poetry expert – or even an avid reader of poems – to enjoy this book. Absolutely no prior knowledge of these poems, or their historical periods, is required. Poetry sceptics are especially welcome: I hope you’ll discover the many surprising and enthralling things we can do with poems, and how a few lines of verse can open up a whole historical world. In this book, I want to invite you to explore new encounters and unexpected adventures. With the right tools, we can unlock the coded and covert messages of these poems in their historical moments: the loaded words and charged language which speak to contemporary factions or controversies, or, even, the gaps and silences which point to something so significant or dangerous it can’t be written. Careful, forensic analysis can reveal a diverse range of voices and perspectives: from power and propaganda to the marginalised and disenfranchised, and those speaking from the very edge of society.

Is it possible to tell the history of England – all those crowded,

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Introduction

colourful, messy and eventful centuries – in just twenty-five poems? It’s been a daunting, exhilarating, thrilling experiment. Following the poems moves us beyond a ‘great men and battles’ version of history, bringing into focus more varied histories and voices. Individual life records, small stories and emotional intimacies are here, bound up with momentous national events and historical milestones.

Spanning 1300 years, many of the historical moments covered in these chapters are deeply strange, even alien to us, both in the materiality of everyday life and in their mindsets and beliefs. The poems open windows into wholly other ways of seeing the world. But even in these other Englands we can discover intense emotional connection and affinity. We listen in on distant griefs, share laughter, rekindle old anger, draw breath alongside companions from centuries long gone in awe and wonder. The mission of this book, in part, is to take up this call to radical empathy across time, experience and difference. Reading these twenty-five poems, I hope, can challenge us to more ambitious, daring, generous ways of imagining and empathising with the lives of others – past and present.

Of course, twenty-five poems can never offer a comprehensive account of English history, though each of these chapters does reach more widely to draw in other texts and historical details. Not all are my favourite poems – though there are certainly words here to cherish and treasure. Instead, I’ve chosen poems which work best as time machines, transporting us into their fascinating moments in the past.

The twenty-five poems I’ve chosen are certainly different from the ones you would have picked if you were writing this book. What are your own landmark poems? Those lines that transport you through a portal into the past? Perhaps they connect with your own personal memories as well as history, taking you instantly to events and experiences in your own life. At the end of the book, there’s space for you to make this book your own, by adding in your own choice of poems. I hope this is a book you’ll return to and share.

Making my own selection of poems, I’ve felt a keen sense of what’s missing – what’s not there. I’ve welcomed this opportunity to think critically about literary value and values, and the notion of an

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English ‘canon’: that literary ‘hall of fame’ constituted over generations by countless anthologies and student textbooks. How to capture a sense of English poetic tradition in just twenty-five poems? What makes a poem worth including and reading today, perhaps hundreds of years after it was written? Are there poems more worth reading now than, say, a century ago? How has a national canon of ‘English Literature’ been formed over time – and who has it excluded? How might we start to escape its confines and fray its edges? Who gets to tell England’s story?

So, this book is also a kind of manifesto, inviting us to think through and beyond familiar notions of ‘English Literature’, ‘history’ and ‘England’, seeking to enlarge our sense of the ways we might tell and interrogate the stories of this country’s past. It shows what can happen when we bring history and literature together into dialogue. And it makes the case for attentive, historically aware, critical reading – an ever more vital tool for navigating the multimedia battlegrounds of our world today.

The most fascinating history is often hidden beneath the surface or between the lines. If we know where to look, there are intriguing, unexpected and powerful stories to be discovered, and extraordinary insights into England’s colourful, turbulent, always contested history.

A Note on Texts and Translations

No existing knowledge of any of these poems, or their historical periods, is expected.

For the first eight chapters of this book, with poems in Old English, Middle English and Latin, I have given my own full translations alongside the original texts. These translations can’t capture the full style and nuance of the original (as the Venerable Bede says, ‘it is not possible to translate a song, however well composed, out of one language and into another without losing some of its grace and dignity’). My primary aim is for them to help readers navigate the original text. For the tricky medieval Latin of Henry of Huntingdon (Chapter 4), I have referred to the excellent translation by Diana Greenway. For later chapters, texts are given in the original language, with some modernised spellings and occasional glosses.

Some of the earliest poems in the book include letter-forms which aren’t generally familiar today. In the first three chapters, you’ll find the Old English runic letter þ (thorn ) and ð (eth ), which both represent th sounds. You’ll also see the letter æ (ash ) – a vowel-sound similar to the a in cat. In Chapter 3, you’ll also notice a symbol like a number 7, which is a conventional medieval abbreviation for and (medieval scribes got tired hands). You don’t need to be able to read the poems aloud or pronounce the words to enjoy them – but it can be fun to try. If you simply ‘say what you see’, you’ll find that familiar words emerge quite readily from the spelling on the page.

I have been fairly broad in my definition of a poem, including songs and an excerpt from a Shakespeare play (blank verse; also a passage regularly anthologised as a ‘poem’ in its own right). Some are full poems, others are extracts, as indicated in the chapter title. Titles are given in quotation marks for shorter poems and in italics for longer poems or stand-alone works, following standard conventions.

A Note on Texts and Translations

For some medieval sources (such as the Peterborough Chronicle or the Rutland Psalter), I have not used italics, as these are descriptions rather than titles proper.

One of my main aims in this book has been to include diverse voices. But it’s more difficult to find, for example, poems written by women or people of colour in the earlier centuries of England’s history. Often these sources are simply not or no longer there. As far as possible, I have tried to represent a wide range of perspectives: men and women, people of colour, varied social classes – even the words of children, so often overlooked in broad-sweep histories of England. Discovering less well-represented voices – across England’s literary history – is still a work in progress, for me and for other historians and scholars of literature.

All the poems in the book contribute to a history of England, or a poetics of Englishness, in some way. They are not all by English poets and were not all composed in England, as discussed in the individual chapters.

1. Beginnings

‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ (around 730)

The beginning isn’t really a beginning at all. ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’, as modern editors have titled it, is a landmark moment for English history, language and literature. It’s there in all the student textbooks and anthologies, selected as the starting-point, the foundation, the bedrock for all the words which follow. Yet what Bede gives us is a brilliant piece of sleight of hand; a beautiful and brilliant illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc, weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs, ece drihten, or onstealde. He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend; þa middangeard moncynnes weard, ece drihten, æfter teode firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.

Now we must praise the Guardian of the heaven-kingdom, the power of the Maker and his design, the work of the glorious Father, as he, eternal Lord, founded the beginning of each of the wonders. He first created heaven as a roof for the children of earth, holy Creator; then the middle-earth, the Guardian of mankind, eternal Lord, afterwards ordained the world for people, Lord almighty.

Bede’s tale of Cædmon and his ‘Hymn’ is an origin story, a carefully crafted myth which underpins ideas of English identity through the Middle Ages and far beyond. Bede’s account of the poet Cædmon

A History of England in 25 Poems is worked into his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ): a monumental book telling how the peoples he calls ‘the Angles, Saxons and Jutes’ settle in Britain from the fifth century onwards, and begin to shape a new nation. ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ conjures the first words sung in English to their new Christian god.

The story of Cædmon is remarkable, putting these precious first words into the mouth of the most humble, lowly figure imaginable. Cædmon, Bede tells us, is a cow-herd, who takes care of the animals at the monastery of Streonæshalch (later known as Whitby Abbey). Cædmon carries a terrible sadness: though he’s growing old, he has never learned any songs. In the evenings, when the fire glows in the hall and his people gather together, Cædmon watches the harp being passed from hand to hand, as the old stories are sung and words shared. When he sees the harp nearing him, Cædmon slips away, out of the light and laughter, and into the lonely dark outside.

We can’t underestimate this pain; the freighting of Bede’s story with the heaviness of loss, shame and exclusion. The mead hall or meduseld is at the heart of the early medieval English imaginary of community and belonging. Among the rich vocabulary for this treasured place is the word seledream – literally ‘hall joys’: resonant with all the rituals of fellowship, feasting and story-telling. But Cædmon doesn’t have a place by the fire in the mead hall. He’s out in the cold.

One night, Bede tells us, Cædmon sees the harp approaching, and hurries out of the hall, back to the stable where his animals are sleeping. The warmth of sleeping oxen, the smells of straw and dung, the faint curls of breath from the animals silvering in the cold night air. If we’re reminded of the wintry stable in another familiar story of beginnings and new birth, then perhaps we’re not too far astray. While Cædmon dozes, suddenly, a figure appears to him in his dream and calls to him by name. ‘Cædmon, sing me something.’ Cædmon immediately protests. ‘I don’t know how to sing.’ He explains that’s why he left the feast and has come here, to be alone with the animals. But the figure insists. ‘What shall I sing?’ Cædmon asks. The reply comes back: ‘Sing to me of the first creation.’

1: Beginnings

So, Cædmon begins to sing words which he has never heard before. And when he wakes, he holds them in his memory, and discovers that he can make more: a flood of beautiful words, woven together in new ways, praising God and remaking all the stories of the Bible in his own tongue. He’s taken to the town-reeve or alderman, and then to the abbey, where the abbess, Hild, listens to his songs. All agree that a heavenly gift has been given.

Hild of Whitby is a real historical figure. Born around 614, she lived until 680, and was the founding Abbess of Whitby: a double monastery, where monks and nuns lived separately, but worshipped together as one community. Whitby was renowned as a place of learning. It was also at the centre of early medieval ecclesiastical politics: in 664 it was the venue for the Synod of Whitby, a major council which sought to determine how the date of Easter should be calculated in the emergent English church: using the system practised in Ireland, or following Rome. (Rome won.)

Bede was a monk at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, not far from Durham in what we now call northern England. A learned and brilliant scholar, writing in Latin, Bede composed works of theology and biblical exegesis, as well as computus (texts concerned with calculation of dates and times) and even a treatise on the workings of the cosmos and movements of the tides. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People isn’t a snappy title, but it’s a clear assertion that for Bede, from the start, the nascent ‘nation’ of the English is bound up with a particular religious identity, church and authority. The History is a remarkable and unique source, giving us much of our information about earlier medieval England – though historians in past centuries were sometimes too ready to accept Bede’s accounts as self-evident fact. Rather, Bede is shaping an English story: crafting the future mnemonics of a nation.

Cædmon is not attested in any other texts beyond Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Cow-herds leave few traces in the historical record. It’s been suggested that his name has its origins in a Brittonic language – the ancestor of present-day languages including Welsh and Cornish. His name might hint that his heritage is not English

A History of England in 25 Poems or Saxon, but British: belonging to the people who lived in Britain before the coming of the Saxons, who are displaced, dispossessed and marginalised by the newcomers. The early English name for the Britons – wealh – seems to have its origin in the name of a Celtic tribe in the western Roman Empire, the Volcae, and became used to refer to peoples perceived to be of Roman descent or culture – like the Romano-British. Later, the meanings of wealh creep in darker directions: foreigner, other, slave. Eventually, it becomes the modern English word ‘Welsh’. Early English law codes prescribe wergild payments – compensation – mandated for violent assault or killing, varying according to the status of the individual. In the Kentish Laws of Ine, probably dating back to the seventh century, the wergild of a wealh is valued at somewhere around half that of an Englishman of comparable status. English poetry is sung into being by an unlikely, subaltern voice.

The first word of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ – ‘Now’ (‘Nu’) – isn’t a clean start. Instead, it’s a hinge, a pivot. It speaks of transformation, silently invoking the ‘then’ of everything which came before. It defines this moment in relation to the ‘before’ time, inventing an instant of renewal, new beginning and repurposing.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History doesn’t start from a blank page, either. In writing his monumental historical work, Bede draws on older Latin texts: history, biblical commentary and exegesis, scripture. His History also has a complex, ambivalent relationship with one specific Latin historical text from post-Roman Britain: On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain (De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae ) by the sixth-century British cleric Gildas, whose home was in present-day Scotland and Wales and, later, Brittany. But, while Gildas interprets the coming of the Saxons as God punishing the Britons for their internal divisions and conflicts, Bede presents them instead as a new chosen people, and the beautiful, fertile island of Britain as a kind of new Promised Land, ordained for them by God. Janus-like, Bede’s History looks back to Gildas, while also looking on, ahead, to a vision for a new nation of the English. It’s a long way from the historical reality of Bede’s own moment: a patchwork of competing

1: Beginnings

kingdoms, often described by later historians as the ‘Heptarchy’, with their own ambitions, royal dynasties and rivalries. ‘England’ doesn’t exist yet – only in Bede’s imagination.

Bede is writing in the eighth century, in his home monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, during a period known as the Golden Age of Northumbria – the early medieval kingdom covering what is now northern England and southern Scotland. Picture the magnificent interlaced designs and stunning illuminated carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, or the towering sculpture of the Ruthwell Cross – carved with figures, Mediterranean-style foliate patterns and runic inscriptions. Or perhaps the intricate beauty of the Franks Casket, now on display in the British Museum: a box made from whalebone, decorated with pictures from great and powerful stories. The Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, the Norse legend of Weland the Smith, the biblical Adoration of the Magi: these stories sit, side by side, alongside a runic verse which imagines the sadness of the whale, from whose bone the box is fashioned, as it is beached on the shore.

Archaeological finds and other artefacts continually remind us that early medieval England was connected with the world beyond. The treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial – dating to the sixth or seventh century – include silver spoons from Byzantium, as well as materials from what’s now Iraq and Syria, possibly brought back by warriors. The sixth-century burial of the ‘Prittlewell Prince’ in Essex includes a copper flagon depicting St Sergius in the decorative style of the Sasanian Empire – the last Persian imperial dynasty before the early Muslim conquests of the seventh to eighth centuries. Bede’s homeland might be almost on the edge of the early medieval known world, but it’s embedded in vital networks of trade, travel and cultural exchange reaching across Europe and into Africa and Asia.

Bede’s History is a bold, ambitious work, inventing for the English people a story of their own. No longer a people in the margins of history, Bede’s book seeks to give them status, authority – and power. His text also gives us our first example of the slippage

A History of England in 25 Poems

between ideas of England and Britain. The St Petersburg manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History – so called because it was taken to St Petersburg around the time of the French Revolution – begins with a beautiful historiated initial (a large opening letter), decorated with vine scrolls, leaves and flowers. Cædmon’s foundational picture of the world is made in the image of the Saxon mead hall, but here, in this first letter of the manuscript, we see a ‘green and pleasant’ imaginary burgeoning into life. But that capital letter is a ‘B’, beginning the word ‘Britannia’ – Britain. Bede is writing England into existence, but he is captivated by the beauty of the island of Britain. From the very beginning, we glimpse the persistent, poetic, dangerous entanglements of England and the island.

The opening of the Ecclesiastical History celebrates the beauty and wonder of the island of Britain – claimed by Bede as the homeland for his ‘English Church and People’. This ‘island of the ocean’ is laden with green – trees, crops, pasture – filigreed with rivers and springs, stocked with natural resources, and gifted with a treasurestore – metal, copper, iron, lead and silver – beneath the ground, as well as fine black jet, perhaps as familiar to Bede as it would have been to Hild and Cædmon from its abundance on the coast near Whitby. Bede describes another marvel, due to Britain’s place ‘almost under the North Pole’. During its short summer nights, complete darkness never falls, ‘so that often in the middle of the night-time it is hard for those who are watching to say whether it is evening twilight which still lingers, or whether morning has come’. The land is full of the wonders of God’s creation.

‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ is a song about creation, and it is itself an act of creation. But, unlike the ‘first creation’ he sings of, this is not an act of making out of nothing. The words of the ‘Hymn’, praising the new Christian god, are not new inventions. Instead, in Cædmon’s song, we see a reappropriation, a repurposing of the language of secular warrior culture, to voice a new belief system. The word ‘God’ is not used. Instead, the ‘Hymn’ imagines the Christian deity as ‘heaven-kingdom’s guardian’ (‘heofonrices weard’) and a powerful worker of ‘glory’ (‘wuldor’). The ‘Hymn’ uses exactly the

1: Beginnings

same vocabulary for God as the songs of the mead hall used for a mighty ruler or lord: ‘drihten’ and ‘frea’.

The words of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ belong to the world of Beowulf : a world of heroes, champions, battle and glory. Even the act of creation celebrated by the poem is shaped by a distinctively early medieval English imaginary: the newly shaped world bears ‘heaven as a roof’ (‘heofon to rofe’), built by its generous protector-lord. The world, as Cædmon sings it, is a mead hall. This daring remaking of creation in English words invests the poet with awesome power. And, the ‘Hymn’ suggests, that’s exactly right. God is described as creator or ‘scyppend’ – a word for ‘maker’ which closely parallels the Old English for poet: scop or shaper.

‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ presents a distinctly English version of God and his creation (‘middangeard’ – the ‘middle earth’ which lies between heaven and hell). We can see a similar impulse in other vocabulary associated with Christianity in pre-Conquest England. Rather than, say, the Latin-derived word ascension, the Old English is upastignesse (literally, ‘up-climbing-ness’). The Holy Trinity, from the Latin trinitas, is þrines : the opening runic letter þ (‘thorn’) is pronounced th, so it sounds exactly like what it means – ‘three-ness’.

The audacious recycling of secular heroic language in ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ is part of wider patterns of reuse and appropriation. This repurposing of words parallels the reuse of other traditions, beliefs and sacred places in Britain, as part of the strategic process of conversion to Christianity. In a famous letter on the mission to bring Christianity to England, Pope Gregory the Great advises that ‘the pagan temples of that people should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols within them. Let holy water be made and sprinkled in the temples; let [Christian] altars be built and relics placed within them.’ This is not a mindless iconoclastic rampage, but a concerted endeavour to overlay old imaginaries with new meanings.

Bede’s good at origin stories. As well as this account of Cædmon and his ‘Hymn’, he also gives us the story of the two slave boys in the marketplace at Rome. Seeing their fair hair and beauty, Pope Gregory asks who they are. ‘Angles’, he is told. ‘Non angli, sed angeli ’,

A History of England in 25 Poems comes his famous reply: ‘Not Angles, but angels’. At that moment, their true nature as God’s chosen people is revealed: they must be converted, saved, brought into the fold of Christendom. Another myth of identity which has exerted power across the centuries, Bede’s story of the slave boys shapes fantasies of racial purity and innate superiority which, later, serve to underpin English (and British) ideologies of power and empire, with all their violence.

Cædmon is a unique figure in English literature and history.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History brings him in from the cold of the cowshed, and incorporates him into an English canon – in a book otherwise populated with kings, saints and bishops. But Cædmon does have one parallel in early medieval English literature – a strange and unsettling counterpart which opens up troubling questions about identity, community and belonging, right from the start of our journey through English words and history.

In the Old English poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero fights a terrible monster, Grendel. Grendel is a ‘mearcstapa’ – a ‘boundarystepper’ or ‘edge-walker’ – who haunts the wilds beyond the world of the mead hall and treads the margins between the human and the other. He raids the once-splendid hall of Lord Hrothgar and feasts on the men inside. Terrifying and appalling, Grendel does, however, have one striking affinity with Cædmon. Like Cædmon, before his dream, Grendel cannot bear the sounds of music and song which echo from the mead hall. Outside, alone in the shadows, Grendel hears the scop sing the story of creation, and how the beauty of the world was shaped for the joy of mankind. And it is agony for him. The Old English uses the verb geþolian : he suffered, was harrowed, tormented.

What does it mean that Cædmon and Grendel share this dark, intimate affinity of pain and shame? Is Grendel what Cædmon might have become, but for the shining visitor in his dream? This uncanny parallel invites us to ask questions, from the beginning of our story of English history and poetry, about the arbitrariness of violence or brutality, and about who is included within the community – and who is cast beyond, at the shadowed edges.

1: Beginnings

There’s one last twist to Bede’s origin myth. Bede’s writing this story as a celebration of Englishness and the English language. He’s making a statement and setting out a kind of manifesto: for the ambition, status and authority of this emerging new people of the English and their place in the world. ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ is an originary moment for that inter-connection of nation, identity and language – sometimes wonderful, sometimes toxic, pernicious and exclusionary, which we’ll trace throughout this book.

But, when the first manuscript of the Ecclesiastical History is written down, there’s no English in this story. Instead, the narrative of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ – including the poem itself – is, like the rest of the History, given entirely in Latin. Bede is apologetic, noting that ‘This is the sense however not the order of the words which he sang while sleeping; for it is not possible to translate a song, however well composed, out of one language and into another without losing some of its grace and dignity’.

The Old English we have here – Bede’s point of origin for literature in this country’s language, and the purpose of his story – is instead reverse-engineered into the story much later. The earliest surviving manuscript which includes the ‘Hymn’ in English as part of the main text dates from the tenth century. In other, earlier manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, the English words of the ‘Hymn’ are retrofitted into the text: squeezed by later scribes into the margins, translating the Latin. That potent, foundational moment of Englishness imagined by Bede almost slips off the edge of the story: a footnote to its own genesis.

Poems, we see already, can be unreliable witnesses to the past. So much can fall through the cracks between their lines. From the very beginning, poetry is a slippery, ambiguous, disconcerting, exasperating and revealing place to look for history.

Vikings

Extract from The Battle of Maldon (around 1000)

Just outside Maldon, near where the River Chelmer runs into the Blackwater Estuary, a narrow causeway leads across saltmarsh and water to the tidal island of Northey. Bladderwrack banks the edges of the narrow track; purple laver and gutweed ribbon the ground. Ripples ridge-and-furrow the water. At the ebb of the tide, rivulets and runnels snake through the mud, like the interlaced worms on the golden treasure of a Saxon hoard. Today, in the June sunshine, black-headed gulls are foraging, swifts squeal and swoop, and a little egret steps fastidiously along a channel. There’s the tang of salt and seaweed in the air; the rich, oozy stink of the marsh. Along the causeway, if you stop to listen, the mud is ticking and tutting, whispering under its breath. All around, the flat edgelands of Essex: land meeting water, sea touching scoured, empty sky.

Here, in August 991, was the site of the Battle of Maldon: a Viking attack met by English fighters led by Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, and recorded in a number of texts, including the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. The Vikings land on Northey Island, while the English army waits across the water, on the mainland, to engage them. The Vikings request passage along the causeway, which Byrhtnoth grants. The ensuing battle is bloody: Byrhtnoth is killed, many of his warriors flee the field, and it is a catastrophic defeat for the English.

But the version of the battle in the Old English poem is something far more complex. Far from the dispassionate, factual account of a modern-day war correspondent, the poem is less interested in what we’d call ‘accuracy’, and more focused on a particular kind of

A History of England in 25 Poems myth-making. The poem mobilises all the resources of Old English heroic tradition to celebrate the courage of Byrhtnoth’s army, to define an emerging nation of England, and to remake a disastrous defeat into a victory for English honour.

And The Battle of Maldon does something more, too. Composed not long after the battle itself, it engages actively in a fraught historical moment and fierce contemporary political controversy. What seems, at first, like timeless heroic verse is in fact an excoriating critique of tenth-century English leadership, and a brilliant piece of propaganda, voiced here through the words of Byrhtnoth himself, as he responds scornfully to the Viking messenger and his offer of truce.

Byrhtnoð maþelode, bord hafenode, wand wacne æsc, wordum mælde, yrre and anræd ageaf him andsware:

‘Gehyrst þu, sælida, hwæt þis folc segeð?

Hi willað eow to gafole garas syllan,

ættrynne ord and ealde swurd, þa heregeatu þe eow æt hilde ne deah.

Brimmanna boda, abeod eft ongean, sege þinum leodum miccle laþre spell,

þæt her stynt unforcuð eorl mid his werode,

þe wile gealgean eþel þysne, Æþelredes eard, ealdres mines, folc and foldan. Feallan sceolon hæþene æt hilde. To heanlic me þinceð

Byrhtnoth spoke out, raised his shield, shook his slender ash spear, spoke with these words, angry and single-minded gave him answer:

‘Do you hear, seaman, what this people says?

They intend to give you spears as tribute, the poisoned tip and ancient sword, that war-gear which will be no profit to you in battle.

Messenger of the seamen, deliver a message back again, tell your people much more unpleasant report –that here stands an unblemished eorl with his company, who wishes to defend this homeland, the land of Æthelræd, my lord, people and territory. The heathens

þæt ge mid urum sceattum to scype gangon unbefohtene, nu ge þus feor hider on urne eard in becomon.

Ne sceole ge swa softe sinc gegangan; us sceal ord and ecg ær geseman, grim guðplega, ær we gofol syllon.’

must die in battle. Too shameful it seems to me that you should go to your ship with our coins unfought, now that you have come here thus far, into our land. You shall not get treasure so easily! Point and blade shall first settle things between us, the grim game of battle, before we give tribute.’

Bloody and devastating, the attack at Maldon in 991 was, of course, by no means the first Viking raid on pre-Conquest England. Raids by the Vikings – more commonly known, at the time, as ‘Danes’ – on the English coast began in the late eighth century, recorded in contemporary sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Lindisfarne, off the north-east coast of England, was one of the monasteries to be sacked. The Chronicle entry for 793 gives an account of the ‘ferocious robbery and slaughter’, prefaced by descriptions of ‘dreadful forewarnings’ which paint the apocalyptic horror of the event in English eyes: lightning, whirlwinds and famine, and ‘fiery dragons’ seen flying in the sky over the kingdom of Northumbria.

Over the following centuries, Viking raids and incursions continued – as well as Danish settlement in the midlands and north of England, resulting in the territory under Danish rule known as the ‘Danelaw’. By the tenth century, the geography of England was changing. The West Saxon king Æthelstan (ruled 927–939) had conquered the last remaining Viking kingdom, York, and brought the various kingdoms and factions of England together under his rule. But by 991, with King Æthelræd ‘The Unready’ on the throne, Viking attacks on England’s coasts were rising again.

In this extract from the poem, Byrhtnoth is speaking – responding directly to the Viking messenger who has just offered a deal instead

A History of England in 25 Poems of battle. ‘Buy off this spear-storm with tribute’, the messenger has offered; ‘we are willing to fix a truce in exchange for the gold’. Old English poetry is structured around alliteration and rhythm instead of rhyme. Here, the stressed, alliterated syllables underline the exchange being offered: spear-attack (‘garræs’) bought off with tribute (‘gafole’), and gold (‘golde’) paid for truce (‘grið’). It’s clearest of all in the final lines of the messenger’s ultimatum. The deal is quite simple: ‘feoh wið freode’ or ‘wealth in exchange for peace’. ‘We’ll go to our ships (scype) with your money (sceattum)’, the Viking envoy says. But the whole tone of his speech has been riling, insulting – condescendingly offering the English a way out, on the assumption that they’re not up to the fight.

Now, Byrhtnoth answers. The poem tells us that he was an old man at the time of the battle – perhaps over sixty. He’s described as a ‘har hilderinc’ or ‘grey-haired battle-warrior’. Other contemporary sources record that he was notably tall – likely over six feet in height. As he raises his voice in speech, he lifts up his weapons, brandishing his shield and ash spear. A conventional motif in heroic poetry and literary depictions of battle speeches, it’s a first clue that this isn’t reportage but epic and myth-making. The exchange of taunting speeches between the two sides is another traditional feature of battle poetry: known as a flyting, these volleys of words anticipate the later exchange of physical blows and violence. Byrhtnoth rejects the insulting Viking offer, calling on a sense of proud English warrior identity. They will not pay tribute.

The historical Battle of Maldon is recorded in a number of contemporary sources, including the Chronicle – the main historical record kept in the English language during the centuries from King Alfred to the Norman Conquest (and, in some cases, beyond), written down in a range of different versions in various places across England. And the entry in the Chronicle for 991 gives us the first clues that the poem The Battle of Maldon might be something more loaded and politically driven than a straightforward account of the battle.

The Chronicle for 991 is typically terse and sparing. But there’s

a significance to the key events it groups together. ‘This year was Ipswich plundered; and very soon afterwards was Alderman Byrhtnoth slain at Maldon. In this same year, it was resolved that tribute should be given, for the first time, to the Danes, for the great terror they caused by the sea-coast. That was first 10,000 pounds. The first who advised this measure was Archbishop Siric.’ The ‘tribute’ referred to by the Chronicle is in fact the payment which later came to be known as Danegeld or, literally, Dane-money. Levied as an unpopular and controversial tax, this money was paid to the Vikings to buy off attacks – a pragmatic policy nevertheless deeply dissonant with the self-image of the English people as a brave, warrior nation.

If we look again at The Battle of Maldon, we can find coded language engaging with the Danegeld question throughout Byrhtnoth’s speech. On the surface, it’s a defiant response to the Viking messenger, in the time-worn traditions of heroic battle poetry. But, if we know what to look for – if we’re alive to the fraught political context of late tenth-century England – then we can see it’s actually a searing response to English policy, and a charge of failed leadership at the highest levels.

Furious, Byrhtnoth picks up the language of tribute and turns it back on the Vikings. He makes a new offer: to give spears as tribute (‘to gafole garas syllan’) – an ironic, violent gift which will be less profitable (an arch understatement) to the invaders. ‘You shall not get treasure so easily!’ he declares. The English army won’t capitulate and pay before they’ve stood their ground and fought.

Placed in a position of extra emphasis, at the beginning of a half line, the words ‘To heanlic’ (‘too shameful’) gain extra force and power. ‘Too shameful it seems to me,’ Byrhtnoth says, ‘that you should go to your ship with our coins, unfought’. Again, there’s that alliterative pairing of ‘sceattum’ (‘coins’) and ‘scype’ (‘ship’). It’s deeply unusual for Old English poetry to include this kind of direct reference to money – to coins. Rather, wealth and value in traditional Old English verse are carried symbolically by treasure: by gifts and rings and ancient heirlooms such as the weapons the English carry into battle here. The reference to money – cold hard

A History of England in 25 Poems cash – is a gut punch, a blow which exposes the Vikings’ greed and the sordid bargain being driven. And that notion of shamefulness is what resonates loudest – what blazes searingly out of the page. Paying off the Danes would be an act of shame.

Byrhtnoth is unequivocally cast as the moral authority here. He is described as an earl ‘unforcuð’, or of ‘unblemished’ reputation. The Old English adjective begins with the negative prefix ‘un’-, just like the modern English translation of the word. Why celebrate Byrhtnoth with a negative – something he’s not ? Does the poem hint, stealthily, that others in positions of leadership are in fact blemished and compromised? Does it plant the germ of an idea that Byrhtnoth’s honour and courage are in contrast to something – or someone – else?

There’s an even clearer hint in the first lines here. Byrhtnoth returns his message to the Viking envoy in a righteous rage: ‘angry and single-minded’ (‘yrre and anræd’). That word anræd is a compound – that is, formed out of two parts: an , or ‘single’, and ræd – ‘counsel’, ‘advice’, or in this context, ‘mind’. We’re left in no doubt that Byrhtnoth is completely resolute and focused on his goal to defeat the Viking army. But ‘anræd’ rings a bell, and again points to something more than a celebration of Byrthnoth’s courage. Someone other than the Vikings, it seems, is in the poem’s firing line.

The English king at the time of the Battle of Maldon – and almost certainly at the time of the composition of the poem also – is Æthelræd, known popularly today as ‘The Unready’. A contemporary Old English epithet too, the name doesn’t mean that he wasn’t ready or equipped (though some might argue so). Instead, it’s formed similarly to the word we’ve just seen used to describe Byrhtnoth. But in Æthelræd’s case, while ræd means ‘counsel’ or ‘advice’, the negative prefix un means ‘no’ or ‘bad’. ‘Æthelræd No-counsel’, ‘Badcounsel’ or ‘Weak-counsel’. It’s a satirical byname which denigrates his leadership – an epithet which arose out of perceived failures, including his weak handling of Viking raids and the Danegeld policy. While Æthelræd is unræd, Byrhtnoth is anræd – a pointed contrast,

the poem depicting a hero whose uncowed honour and singlemindedness shame the king.

Byrhtnoth’s single-minded vow to defend his homeland is striking – especially since the idea of a single English nation is only just coming into being. King Æthelstan’s unification of the separate English kingdoms was, in reality, still a work in progress. But Byrhtnoth’s speech is emphatic, clear, unwavering in its sense of what he’s fighting for. The language is emotive. Byrhtnoth declares his intention to defend ‘this homeland, the land of Æthelræd, my lord, people and territory’. The word for homeland, ‘eþel’, is charged with notions of belonging, devotion – and even baked-in, ready-made nostalgia. The Old English ‘folc and foldan’ unites the concepts of people and territory in a perfectly linked, seemingly inviolable, alliterative pairing.

There’s a sense of violation here: that the Vikings have intruded ‘too far’ into English land: an insult which must be met with battle. But the Vikings, in fact, play a very useful role in the poem’s depiction of a fledgling England. Paradoxically, it’s this moment of threat and jeopardy which allows the nascent idea of a unified nation of England to be reinforced and strengthened. England and Englishness – embodied in the poem by Byrhtnoth’s courage – are defined against the Vikings, imagined as a foil or opposing ‘other’. The poem exploits religious difference to do this, too, when Byrhtnoth asserts that ‘the heathens must die in battle’. The poem does energetic, determined work in the invention of an idea of England – an idea which will at times, over the centuries, exclude, dehumanise and monster others in its quest for endurance and power.

So, stripping back the poem’s propaganda and its political manoeuvring, who was Byrhtnoth really? He’s one of several named characters in the poem, though most are likely an imagined cast of foot soldiers used to paint a picture of an English army unified across geographical regions and across age and social rank. Some names seem more obviously symbolic. Two characters named Godric are on the battlefield: one deserts and flees the battle, while the other fights on, nobly, to a heroic death. Meaning ‘good kingdom’, their

A History of England in 25 Poems shared name – and contrasting choices – seem to present the stark alternatives facing England as it deals with the Viking threat: to capitulate or to keep its honour.

We do know that Byrhtnoth was a real historical figure. As well as the Chronicle, he’s attested in other texts, including the Liber Eliensis or Book of Ely – a monastic chronicle from the Abbey of Ely, telling the history of the monastery – and the Life of St Oswald, an English saint. He’s depicted in these texts as a great leader and brave warrior – but also as a figure of piety and devotion; a patron and benefactor of the church. Perhaps that devout Christian is hard to reconcile with the image of Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, apparently relishing the prospect of the ‘game of battle’ about to unfold. We see conflicting sides to Byrhtnoth in the poem: a fierce warrior who dies saying a prayer; a noble leader defending his homeland who sends his men into what turns out to be a suicide mission. There are hints of hubris and arrogance even in the noble Byrhtnoth depicted in the poem. After his response to the Viking messenger, it becomes plain that the tide is against them: the Vikings are stranded on Northey Island and can’t reach the mainland to engage the English. The watery geography is instantly recognisable from the causeway across the saltmarsh today: the poem tells us that ‘then came flowing / the flood after the ebb’ – that is, the turn of the tide. The ‘sea-streams’ (‘lagustreamas’) are rushing in, and the armies are cut off from each other ‘because of the water there’.

Byrhtnoth has a dilemma: to engage the Vikings or leave them stranded. He chooses to offer them safe passage across the causeway (the poem calls it a ‘ford’) to the mainland – perhaps rather than letting the Vikings sail along the coast to attack an undefended landing point. But the poem deals even Byrhtnoth a word of reckoning here. In the Old English, it tells us that he allows the Vikings to cross because of his ‘ofermode’.

Ofermod isn’t an easy word to translate. Mod means ‘spirit’ or ‘courage’ – almost always a virtue in Old English heroic literature. Ofer is what it looks like: ‘over’ or ‘excessive’. If a great hero has to have a flaw, then an excess of courage isn’t a bad one. But the word

can be translated as ‘pride’, ‘arrogance’ or ‘hubris’. And it’s used on another, telling, occasion in Old English poetry: the story of the fall of the angels from heaven. They are cast down from God’s presence into the torment of hell due to the ‘ofermod’ of Satan: his deadly pride and presumption. Intentionally or not, The Battle of Maldon ends up calling attention to the complexities and challenges of leadership, suggesting, perhaps, that truly unblemished leadership in a time of war is ultimately impossible.

Indeed, one of the later writers inspired by The Battle of Maldon is the great fantasy author – and medievalist scholar – J. R. R. Tolkien, whose verse-play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (written in an alliterative style, similar to Old English poetry) imagines two warriors in the aftermath of the battle, recovering the body of Byrhtnoth from the field. The play is accompanied by an important essay on the Old English word ofermod and its possible meanings. The play’s two characters, Tidwald and Torhthelm, exchange their own different opinions about whether Byrhtnoth was a noble hero or a fool whose error cost the lives of his men. But Tolkien himself is alive to the complexity – the tragedy – of Byrhtnoth’s dilemma and the price of heroism. In Tolkien’s own flawed heroes – Boromir, Theoden or Isildur, in his world of Middle Earth – we see echoes of the moral ambiguity and complexity to which the Old English poem points.

Today, not far from the causeway to Northey Island, a statue of Byrhtnoth, by the British sculptor John Doubleday, looks out across the Blackwater and the battle site. Doubleday is known for his statues of political leaders, such as Nelson Mandela and Golda Meir, as well as English cultural heroes: The Beatles, Sherlock Holmes, Laurel and Hardy. A plaque set into the ground near the monument states that Byrhtnoth was ‘the principal voice in rejecting the policy of appeasement which dominated’ in the late tenth century.

‘Appeasement’: it’s an interesting and deliberate choice of word. It casts the Battle of Maldon in the image of more recent resistance against aggression in Europe – most strikingly, of course, the disastrous British policy, in the 1930s, of allowing Hitler’s Nazi Germany