"It might have ended the darkness three centuries before Abelard had it not been for the quarrels and incompetence of Charlemagne's successors, the feudal anarchy of the barons, the disruptive struggle between Church and state and the Normans, Magyar, and Saracen invasions invited by these ineptitudes.

"One man, one lifetime, had not availed to establish a new civilization.

"The short-lived revival was too narrowly clerical. The common citizen had no part in it. Few of the nobles cared a fig for it. Few of them even bothered to learn how to read.

"Charles himself must bear some blame for collapse of his empire. He had so enriched the clergy that the power of the bishops, now that his strong hand was lifted, outweighed that of the emperor.

"He had been compelled, for military and administrative reasons, to yield a dangerous degree of independence to the courts and barons in the provinces. He had left the finances of an imperially burdened government dependent upon the loyalty and integrity of these rude aristocarats and upon the modest income of his own lands and mines. He had not been able, like the Byzantine emperors, to build up a buraucracy of civil servants responsible only to the central power, or capable of carrying on the government through all vicissitudes of imperial personnel.

"Within a generation after his death the missi dominici who had spread his authority through the counties, were disbanded or ignored and the local lords slipped out of central control.

"Louis the Pious (814-40) was as tall and handsome as his father -- modest, gentle, and gracious and as incorribibly lenient as Caesar. Brought up by priests, he took to heart the moral precepts that Charlemagne had practiced with such moderation. He had one wife and no concubines. He expelled from the court his father's mistresses and his sisters' paramours and when the sisters protested, he immured them in nunneries. He took the priests at their word and bade the monks live up to their Benedictine rule.

"Wherever he found injustice or exploitation he tried to stop it and to right what wrong had been done. The people marveled to find him always taking the side of the weak or poor.

"Feeling bound by Frank custom, he divided his empire into kingdoms ruled by his sons -- Pepin, Lothaire, and Louis 'the German' (whom we shall call Ludwig). By his second wife, Judith, Louis had a fourth son, known to history as Charles the Bald.

"Louis loved him with almost grandparental infatuation and wished to give him a share of the empire, annulling the division of 817. The three older sons objected and began eight years of civil war against their father. The majority of the nobles and the clergy supported the rebellion. The few who seemed loyal deserted Louis in a crisis at Roghfeld (near Colmar) which thereafter was known as the Lugenfeld, the Field of Lies.

"Louis bade his remaining supporters leave him for thir own protection and surrendered to his sons (833). They jailed and tonsured Judith, confined young Charles in a convent and ordered their father to abdicate and do public penance.

"In a church at Soissons Louis, surrounded by thirty bishops, and in the presence of his son and succssor Lothaire, was compelled to bare himself to the waist, prostrate himself upon a haircloth, and read aloud a confession of crime. He took the gray garb of a penitent and for a year was imprisoned in a monastery.

"When Louis V died without issue (987), the nobles and prelates of France sought leadership in some other line than the Carolingian.

"They found it in the descendants of a marquess of Neustria significantly named Robert the Strong (d.866). The Odo who had saved Paris was his son. A grandson, Hugh the Great (d.956) had acquired by purchase of war almost all the region between Normandy, the Seine, and the Loire as his feudal realm and had wielded more wealth and power than the kings. Now Hugh's son, called Hugh Caper, had inherited the wealth and power and apparently the ability that had won them.

"To crowd them into a page for brevity's sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace. Monasteries continued to be built throughout this terrible ninth century and were often the centers of busy industry. Rouen, despite raids and fires, grew stronger from trade with Britain.

"Cologne and Mainz dominated commerce on the Rhine and in Flanders thriving centers of industry and trade developed at Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai, Dinant, Cambrai, Liege and Valenciennes.

"The monastic libraries suffered tragic losses of classic treasure during the raids and doubtless many churches were then destroyed which had opened schools on the lines of Charlemagne's decree.

"Libraries survived at the monasteries or churches of Fulda, Lorsch, Reichenau, Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Liege, Laon, Reims, Corbie, Fleury, St. Denis, Tours, Bobbio, Monte Cassino, St. Gall....

"The Benedictine monastery at St. Gall was acclaimed for its writers as well as for its school and its books. Here Notker Balbulus -- the Stammerer -- (840-912) wrote excellent hymns and the Chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall, here Notker -- the Thick-lipped -- (960-1002) translated Boethius, Aristotle, and other classics into German.

"Remy of Auxerre opened a public school at Paris in 900. In the tenth century school were established at Auxerre, Corbie, Reims, and Liege.

"At Chartres about 1006, Bishop Fulbert (960-1028) founded a school that became the most renowned in France before Abelard. There the venerabilis Socrates, as his pupils called him, organized the teaching of science, medicine, and classical literature as well as theology, Scripture, and liturgy.

Fulbert was a man of noble devotion, saintly patience, and endless charity. To his school, before the end of the eleventh century, would come such scholars as John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Berengar of Tours, and Gilbert de la Porree. Meanwhile, now at Compiegne, now at Laon, the Palace School established by Charlemagne reached the height of its glory under the encouragement and protection of Charles the Bald.

"To the Palace School, in 845, Charles invited divers Irish and English scholars.

"Among them was one of the most original and audacious minds of the Middle Ages, a man whose existence casts doubt upon the advisability of retaining the phrase 'Dark Ages' even for the ninth century. His name doubly revealed his origin. Johannes Scotus Eriugena -- 'John the Irishman, born in Erin.' We shall call him simply Erigena.

"Though apparently not an ecclesiastic, he wss a man of wide learning, a master of Greek, a lover of Plato and the classics, and something of a wit. A story that has all the earmarks of literary invention tells how Charles the Bald, dining with him, asked him Quid distat inter sottum et Scotum -- 'What distinguishes' (literally, what separates) 'a fool from an Irishman?' -- to which John is said to have answered, 'The table.' Nevertheless Charles was fond of him, attended his lectures, and probably enjoyed his heresies.

"John's book on the Eucharist interpreted the sacrament as symbolical and by implication qustioned the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread or wine. When Gottschalk, a German monk, preached absolute predestinatianism, and therefore denied free will in man, Archbishop Hincmar asked Erigena to write a reply.

"The resultant treatise De civina praedestinatione (c.851) began with a startling exaltation of philosophy. 'In earnestly investigating and attempting to discover the reason of all things, every means of attaining to a pious and perfect doctrine lies in that science and discipline which the Greeks call philosophy' In effect the book denied predestination. The will is free in both God and man. God does not know evil, for if He knew it, He would be the cause of it.

"Erigena, at the King's request, now undertook the task. The translation deeply influenced Erigena and re-established in unofficial Christian theology the Neoplatonic picture of a universe evolving or emanating out of God through different stages or degrees of diminishing perfection and slowly returning through different degrees back into the deity.

"This became the central idea of John's own masterpiece De divisione naturae (867). Here, amid much nonsense, and two centuries before Abelard is a bold subjection of theology and revelation to reason and an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy.

"John accepts the authority of the Bible but since its sense is often obscure, it must be interpreted by reason -- usually by symbolism or allegory. Says Erigena:-'Authority sometimes proceeds from reason but reason never from authority.

"For all authority that is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it rests on its own strength,needs no reinforcement by any authority.' 'We should not allege the opinions of the holy Fathers unless it be necessary thereby to strengthen arguments in the eyes of men who, unskillful in reasoning, yield rather to authority than to reason.'

"He divides Nature into four kinds of being:-

1 - that which creates but is not created -- viz. God;
2 - that which is created and creates == viz. the prime causes, principles, prototypes, Platonic Ideas, Logos, by whose operation the world of particular things is made;
3 - that which is created and does not create -- viz. the said world of particular things and
4 - that which neither creates nor is created -- i.e. God as the final and absorbing end of all things. 'God is everything that truly is, since he makes all things and is made in all things.'

"There was no creation in time for this would imply a change in God. 'When we hear that God made everything we ought to understand nothing other than that God is in all things -- i.e. subsists as the essence of all things' 'God Himself is comprehended by no intellect. Neither is the secret essence of anything created by Him comprehensible.

"We perceive only accidents, not essences' -- phenomena, not noumena, as Kant would say. The sensible qualities of things are not inherent in the things themselves, but ae produced by our forms of perception. 'When we hear that God wishes, loves, chooses, sees, hears, we should think nothing else than that His ineffable essence and powers are being expressed by meanings co-natural with us' (congenial to our nature) 'lest the true and pious Christian be silenced concerning the Creator and dare say nothing of Him for the instruction of simple souls.

"Only for a like purpose may we speak of God as masculine or feminine. 'He' is neither. If we take 'Father' as meaning the creative substance or essence of all things, and 'Son' as the Divine Wisdom according to which all things are made or governed, and 'Spirit' as the life or vitality of creation, we may think of God as a Trinity.

"Heaven and hell are not places but conditions of soul. Hell is the misery of sin, heaven is the happiness of virtue and the ecstasy of the divine vision (the perception of divinity) revealed in all things to the soul that is pure. The Garden of Eden was such a state of soul, not a place on the earth. All things are immortal. Animals too, like men, have souls tht pass back, after death, into the God or creative spirit from whom they emanated.

"All history is a vast outward flow of creation by emanation and an irresistible inward tide that finally draws all things back into God."</I<>

Any one want to chew into this?

"But the Church properly suspected it as reeking with heresy. In 865 Pope Nicholas I demanded of Charles the Bald that he should either send John to Rome for trial or dismiss him from the Palace School 'that he may no longer give poison to those who seek for bread.' We do not know the outcome.

"William of Malmesbury relates that 'Johannes Scotus came to England and our monastery as report says, was pierced with the iron pens of the boys whom he instructed and died from the results. Probably the tale was a school boy's wishful dreamn.

"Philosophers like Gerbert, Abelard and Gilbert de la Porree were secretly influenced by Erigena but for the most part he was forgotten in the chaos and darkness of the age.

"When in the thirteenth century his boook was exhumed from oblivion, it was condemned by the Council of Sens (1225) and Pope Honorius III ordered that all copies should be sent to Rome and there be burned.

"In these disturbed centuries French art marked time.

"Despite Charlemagne's example, the French continued to build their churches on the basilican plan. About 996 William of Volpiano, an Italian monk and architect, became head of the Norman abbey of Fecamp. He brought with him many of the devices of the Lombard and Romanesque style. Apparently it was his pupils who built the great Romanesque abbey church of Jumiege (1045-67).

"In 1041 another Italian, Lanfranc, entered the Norman monastery at Bec and soon made it a vibrant intellectual center. Students flocked to it in such number that new buildings had to be provided. Lanfranc designed them, perhaps with some more expert help.

"Not a stone remains of his structures but the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen (1077-81) survives as a testimony to the powerful Romanesque style developed in Normandy by Lanfranc and his fellows.

"All over France and Flanders in the eleventh century new churches were built and artists adorned them with murals, mosaics, and statuary.

"Charlemagne had directed that church interiors should be painted for the instruction of the faithful. The palaces at Aachen and Ingelheim were decorated with frescoes. Doubtless many churches followed these examples.

"The last fragments of the Aachen frescoes were destroyed in 1944 but similar murals survive in the church of St. Germain at Auxerre. These differ only in scale from the style and figures in the manuscript illumination of the time.

"At Tours, in the reign of Charles the Bald, a great Bible was written and painted by the monks and presented to the King. It is now No. 1 of the Latin codices in the Bbliotheque Nationale at Paris.

"Still more beautiful is the ' 'Lothaire' Gospel also made at this time by the monks of Tours.

"The monks of Reims, in the same ninth century, produced the famous 'Utrecht' Psalter -- 108 vellum leaves containing the Psalms and the Apostles' Creed, exuberantly illustrated with a veritable menagerie of animals and a museum of tools and occcupation.

"The unification of western continental Europe achieved by Charlemagne was never restored, except by Napoleon and Hitler.

"But Hugh's France was not our France. Aquitaine and Burgundy were virtually independent duchies and Lorraine would for seven centuries attach itself to Germany.

"It was a France heterogeneous in race and speech.

"Northeastern France was more Flemish than French and had a large German element in its blood.

"Normandy was Norse.

"Brittany was Celtic and aloof, dominatd by refugees from Britain.

"Provence was still in stock and speech a Roman-Gallic 'province.'

"France near the Pyranees was Gothic.

"Catalonia, tecnically under the French monarchy, was Goth-alonia. The Loire devided France into two regions of diverse cultures and tongues.

"The task of the French monarchy was to unify this diversity and make a nation from a dozen peoples.

"For a time nobles ruled for his son. Soon William began to issue orders in the first person. A rebellion tried to unseat him but he put it down with dignified ferocity.

"He was a man of craft and courage and farseeing plans, a god to his friends, a devil to his foes. He bore with good humor many quips about his birth and signed himself, now and thenm, Gulielmus Nothus -- William the Bastard. But when he besieged Alencon, and the besieged hung hides over their walls in allusion to his grandfather's trade, he cut off the hands and feet and gouged out the eyes of his prisoners and shot these members from his catapults into the town. Normandy admired his brutality and iron rule and prospered.

"William moderated the exploitation of the peasantry by the nobles and appeased these with fiefs. He dominated and presided over the clergy and appeased them with gifts. He attended devoutly to his religious duties and shamed his father by unprecedented marital fidelity.

"He fell in love with the beautiful Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. He was not disconcerted by her two children and her living but separted husband. She sent William away with insults, saying that she 'would rather be a veiled nun than marry a bastard.'

"He persevered, won her, and married her despite the denunciations of the clergy. He deposed Bishop Malger and Abbot Lanfranc for condemning the marriage and burned down part of the abbey of Bec in his rage. Lanfranc persuaded Pope Nicholas II to validate the union. William, in atonement, built at Caen the famous Norman Abbaye aux Hommes.

"By this marriage William allied himself with the Count of Flanders. In 1048 he had already signed an entente with the king of France.

"Asser describes him as then illiteratus, which could mean either illiterate or Latinless. He was apparently epileptic and suffered a seizure at his wedding feast. But he is pictured as a vigorous hunter, handsome and graceful, and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill.

"A month after his accession he led his little army against the Danes at Wilton and was so badly defeated that to save his throne he had to buy peace from the foe.

"In 878 he won a decisive victory at Ethandun (Edington).

"Half the Danish host crossed the Channel to raid weakened France. The rest, by the Peace of Wedmore, agreed to confine themselves to northeastern England in what came to be called the Danelaw.

"Alfred, says the not quite reliable Asser, led his army into East Anglia 'for the sake of plunder,' conquered the land, and -- perhaps to unify England against the Danes -- made himself king of East Anglia and Mercia as well as of Wessex.

"Then, like a lesser Charlemagne, he turned to the work of restoration and government. He reorganized the army -- built a navy -- established a common law for his three kingdoms -- reformed the administration of justice -- provided legal protection for the poor -- built or rebuilt cities and towns -- and erected 'royal halls and chambers with stone anbd wood' for his growing governmental staff.

"An eighth of his revenue was devoted to relief of the poor -- another eighth to education. At Reading, his capital, he established a palace school and gave abundantly to the educational and religious work of churches and monasteries. He recalled sadly how in his boyhood 'the churches stood filled with treasures and books before they had all been ravaged and burned' by the Danes. Now 'so clean was learning decayed among English folk that very few there were that could understand their rituals in English, or translate aught out of Latin.'

"He sent abroad for scholars -- for Bishop Asser from Wales, for Erigena from France, and for many others -- to come and instruct his people and himself. He mourned that he had had so little time for reading and he now gave himself like a monk to pious and learned studies. He still found reading difficult but 'night and day he commanded men to read to him.'

"Recognizing, almost before any other European, the rising importance of the vernacular tongues, he arranged to have certain basic books rendered into English. He himself laboriously translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Gregory's Pastoral Care, Orosius' Universal History, and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England.

"Anglo-Saxon institutions, speech, and ways had in six centuries sunk such roots that to this day neither the government nor the character nor the language of the English can be understood without them.

"In the newsless intervals between war and war, crime and crime, there had been a reorganization of tillage and trade, a resurrection of literature, a slow formation of order and law.

"History gives no ground for the delusion that Anglo-Saxon England was a paradise of free peasants living in democratic village communities. The leaders of the Anglo-Saxon hosts appropriated the land. By the seventh century a few families owned two thirds of the soil of England. By the eleventh century most towns were included in the property of a thane (noble), a bishop, or the king.

"During the Danish invasions many peasants exchanged ownership for protection. By 1000 the bulk of them paid rent in produce or labor to some lord.

"There were tun-moots or town meetings and folk-moots or hundred-moots that served as assemblies and courts for a shire. But only landowners were allowed to attend these gatherings.

"After the eighth century they declined in authority and frequency and were largely replaced by the manorial courts of the lords. The government of England lay essentially in the national Witenagemot ('meeting of the wise') -- a relatively small assemblage of thanes, bishops, and the leading ministers of the Crown. Without the consent of this incipient Parliament no English king could be chosen or sustained or add a rood to the personal estates from which he derived his regular revenues. Without it he could not legislate or tax or judge or wage war or make peace.

"The only resource of the monarchy against this aristocrcy lay in an informal alliance of throne and Church. The English state before and after the Norman Conquest depended upon the clergy for public education, social order, national unity, even for political administration. St. Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury, became chief counselor under kings Edmund (940-6) and Edred (946-55). He defended the middle and lower classes against the nobles,boldly critisized monachs and princes, was exiled by King Edwig (955-9), was recalled by Edgar (959-75) and secured the crown for Edward the Martyr (975-.

"Compurgation, wergild, and ordeal survived but trial by combat was unknown. The wergild varied instructively in Anglian law. The fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrinsas ($13,000), a bishop, 15,000, a thane or a priest 2,000, a coor or free peasant, 266.

"By Saxon law a man paid one or two shillings for inflicting a wound an inch long, thirty shillings for slicing off an ear. It should be added howver, that a shilling could buy a sheep. By the laws of Ethelbert an adulterer was obliged to pay the husband a fine and buy him another wife.

"Any person who resisted a court order was declared an 'outlaw', his goods were forfeited to the king and anyone might kill hm with impunity.

"In some cases wergild was not admitted, and severe punishments were inflicted: enslavement, flogging castration, amputation -- of hands, feet, upper lip, nose or ear -- and death by hanging, beheading, burning, stoning, drowning, or precipitation into an abyss.

"The economy, like the law, was primitive and far less developed than in Roman Britain. Much work had been done in clearance and drainage but England in the ninth century was still half forest, heath, or fern and wild beasts -- bears, boars, wolves -- still lurked in the woods.

"The ferns were tilled mostly by bondsmen or slaves. Men might fall into slavery through debt or crime, wives and children could be sold into slavery by husbands or fathers in need and all the children of a slave, even if begotten by freemen, were slaves. The owner might kill his slave at will. He might make a female slave pregnant and then sell her.

"The slave could not enter a suit at court. If a stranger slew him, the modest wergild went to his master. If he fled and was caught he might be flogged to death. The main commerce of Bristol was in slaves.

"Nearly all the population was rural, towns were hamlets and cities were towns. London, Exeter, York, Chester, Bristol, Glocester, Oxford, Norwich, Worcester, Winchester was small but grew rapidly after Alfred's time. When Bishop Mellitus came to preach in London in 601 he found only 'a scanty and healthen population' in what had been a metropolis in Roman days.

"Benedict Biscop opened a monastic schoool at Wearmouth about 660. Bede was one of its graduates. Archbishop Egbert established at York (735) a cathedral school and library that became the chief seat of secondary education in England.

"These and other schools made England in the second half of the eighth century the leader of European learning north of the Alps.

"The fine devotion of the monastic educators shines out in the greatest scholar of his time, the Venerable Bede (673-735).

"He summed up his life with modest brevity:-'Bede, the servant of Christ, a priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Who, being born in the territory of that monastery, was delivered up by my kinsfolk, when I was seven years of age, to be brought up by the most reverend abbot Benedict (Biscop) and from that time spending all the days of my life in the same monastery, I have applied all my diligence to the study of the Scriptures. And observing the regular discipline, and keeping the daily service of singing in the church, I have taken delight always either to learn, or to teach, or to write. In the nineteenth year of my life I was made deacon. In my thirtieth I became a priest and from that time until the fifty-ninth year of my age I have employed myself upon Holy Scripture and in these following works...'

"--all in Latin. They included Biblical commentaries, homilies, a chronology of world history, treatises on grammar, mathematics, science, and theology, and above all, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or Church History of the English Nation (731).

"Unlike most monastic historiss, this is no dry chronicle. Perhaps, towards the end, it is too heavy with miracles and always it is innocently credulous, as befitted a mind immured from the age of seven. Nevertheless it is clear and captivating marrative, rising now and then to a simple eloquence, as in the description of the Anglo-saxon Conquest.

"English was the language of the Angles, but it differed little from Saxon and was intelligible to Franks, Norwegians and Danes. These five peoples spoke varieties of German and Enlgish grew out of German speech.

"As early as the seventh century there was a considerable Anglo-Saxon literature. We must judge it largely from fragments for most of it perished when Christianity brought in the Latin script (replacing the runic characters of Anglo-Saxon writing) -- when the Danish Conquest destroyed so many libraries and when the Norman Conquest almost swamped the English languge with French words. Moreover, many of these Anglo-Saxon poems were pagan and had been transmitted orally through generations of 'gleemen' or minstrels who were a bit loose in life and speech and whom monks and priests were forbidden to hear.

"It was probably an eighth-century monk, however, who wrote one of the oldest extant Anglo-Saxon fragments -- a verse paraphrase of Genesis, not quite as inspired as the original. Interpolated into the poem is the translation of a German narrative of the Fall. Here the verse comes to life, largely because Satan is represented as a defiant and passionate rebel.

"Perhaps Milton found here a hint for his Lucifer. Some of the Anglo-Saxon poems are elegies. So 'The Wanderer' tells of happy days gone by in the baronial hall. Now the lord is dead, 'all this firm-set earth becomes empty' and 'sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.'

"In 3183 lines are apparently the entire work. The verse is rhymeless but alliterative antistrophic rhyuthm in a West Saxon dialect quite unintelligible to us today. The story seems childish -- Beowulf, prince of the Geats (Goths?) in southern Sweden, crosses the sea to free the Danish King Hrothgar from the dragon Grendel. He overcomes Gendel and even Grendel's mother, sails back to Geatland and reigns justly for fifty years.

"A third dragon, a firedrake, now appears and ravages the land of the Geats. Beowulf attacks it and is seriously wounded. His comrade Wiglaf comes to his aid and together they kill the beast. Beowulf dies of his wound and is burned on a funeral pyre.

"The tale is not so naive as this sounds.

"The dragon of medieval literature represents the wild beasts that lurked in the woods about the towers of Europe.

"The terrified imagination of the people might be forgiven for conceiving them fantastically and it gratefully wove legend about the men who conquered such animals and made the hamlets safe.

"Certain passages of the poem are incongruously Christian as if some kindly monkish editor had sought to preserve a heathen masterpiece by inserting here and there a pious line.

"But the tone and incidents are purely pagan. If was life and love and battle on the earth that interested these 'fair women and brave men' not some strifeless paradise beyond the grave.

"Beowulf is probably the oldest extant poem in the literature of Britain but Caedmon's (d.680) is the oldest name.

"We know him only through a pretty passge in Bede. In the monastery of Whitby, says the Ecclesiastical History, was a simple brother who found it so hard to sing that whenever his turn came to chant he fled to some hiding place. One night as he lay asleep in his stable lair, it seemed to him that an angel appeared and said 'Caedman, sing me something. The monk protested that he could not. The angel commanded. Caedman tried and was startled at his success. In the morning he recalled the song and sang it.

"Men talk prose for centuries 'without knowing it' before they have leisure or vanity to mold it into art.

"Alfred is the first clear figure in the prose literature of England. His translations and prefaces were eloquent through simple sincerity and it was he who, by dint of editing and adding, transformed the 'Bishop's roll,' kept by the clerks of Winchester cathedral, into the most vigorous and vivid sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- the first substantial work of English prose. His teacher Asser may have written most of the life of Alfred. Perhaps it is a later compilation (c.974).

"In any event it is an early instance of the readiness with which English men used English instead of Latin for works of history or theology while the Continent still blushed to write such dignities in the 'vulgar' speech.

"Even among poetry and war men and women found time and spirit to give form to significance and beauty to things of use.

"Says Asser:-'Alfred established a school of art at Athelney, brought to it from all quarters monks skilled in arts and crafts, and 'continued during his frequent wars to teach his workers in gold and his artificers of all kinds.'

"Dunsten, not content with being both a statesman and a saint, worked cleverly in metal and gold, was a good musician, and built a pipe organ for his cathedral at Glastonbury. Art work in wood, metal, and cloisonne enamel, was carried on. Gem-cutters joined with carvers to make the jeweled and sculptured crosses of Ruthwell and Bewcastle (c.700).

"A famous equestrian statue of King Cadwallo (d.677) was cast in brass near Ludgate. Women made coverlets and tapestries and embroideries 'of a most delicate thread.' The monks of Winchester illuminated with radiant color a tenth-century benedictional.

"Winchester itself and York built stone cathedrals as early as 635. Benedict Biscop brought the Lombard style to England from the church that he built at Wearmouth in 674. Canterbury rebuilt in 950 the cathedral that had survived from Roman times. We know from Bede that Benedict Biscop's church was adorned with paintings made in Italy 'so that all who entered, even if ignorant of letters, which ever way they turned, should either contemplate the ever-lovely aspect of Christ and His saints or, having the Last Judgment before their eyes, might remember to examine themselves more strictly.'

"In general the seventh century saw an exuberance of construction in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Conquest was complete, the Danish had not begun, and architects, who had heretofore built in wood, now had the resources and spirit to raise great shrines in stone.

"Yet it must be confessed that Benedict imported his architects, glassmakers, and goldsmiths from Gaul. Bishop Wilfrid brought sculptors and painters from Italy to decorate his seventh-century church at Hexham.

"The beautifully illuminated Gospel Book of Lindisfarne (c.730) was the work of Irish monks transplantd by the eremitical or missionary zeal to that bleak isle off the Northumberland coast.

"His early reign was tarnished with cruelty. He banished the children of Edmund Ironsides and had Edmund's brother murdered to forestall an Anglo-Saxon restoration.

"But then, noting that the widow and sons of King Ethelred were alive at Rouen, he cut many knots by offering Emma his hand in marriage (1017). She was thirty-three, he twenty-three. She consented and at one stroke Cnut secured a wife, an alliance with Emma's brother, the Duke of Normandy, and a safe throne.

"From that moment his reign became a blessing for England. He brought under discipline the disorderly nobles who had broken the unity and spirit of England. He protected the island from further invasion and gave it twelve years of pece. He accepted Christianity, built many churches, raised a shrine at Assandun to commemorate the Anglo-Saxons, as well as the Danes, who had fought there, and himself made a pilgrimage to Edmund's tomb.

"He promised to follow the existing laws and institutions of England and kept his word with two exceptions -- he insisted that county government, which had been debased by autocratic nobles, should be under his own appointees and he replaced the archbishop with a lay minister as chief counselor to the Crown.

"He developed an administrative staff and civil service that gave unprecedented continuity to the government. After the insecure early years of his rule, nearly all his appointees were Englishmen. He labored constantly in the tasks of state and repeatedly visited every part of his kingdom to supervise the administration of justice and the execution of the laws.

"He came in as a Dane and died as a Englishman. He was King of Denmark as well as of England and in 1028 he became also King of Norway but it was from Winchester that he ruled this triple realma."

I think of some of our founding fathers who came in as Englishmen and went out as Americans.

Any comments here about "how to be a Statesman?

"Celt and Gaul, Angle and Saxon and Jute, Dane and Norman, mingled their blood in marriage or otherwise, to transform the undistinguished and uninitiative Briton of Roman day into the vocal buccaneers of Elizabeth's time and the silent world conquerors of later centuries.

"The Danes, like the Germans and the Norse, brought into England an almost mystic love of the sea, a willingness to accept its treacherous invitation to adventure and trade in distant lands.

"Culturally, the Danish invasions were a blight. Architectue marked time. The art of illumination decayed from 750 to 950. The intellectual progress so promoted by Alfred was checked, even as in Gaul Norse raids were canceling the labors of Charlemagne.

"Cnut might have repaired more of the damage his people had wrought had he been granted a longer life.

"But men wear out rapidly in war or government. Cnut died in 1035, aged forty. Norway at once threw off the Danish yoke. Harthacnut, Cnut's son and appointed heir, had all he could do to protect Denmark against Norwegian invasion. Another son, Harald Harefoot, ruled England for five years, then died. Harthacnut ruled it for two years and passed away (1042). Before his death he summoned from Normandy the surviving son of Ethelred and Emma and recognized this Anglo-Saxon stepbrother as heir to the English throne.

"But Edward the Confessor (1042-66) was as much of a foreigner as any Dane. Carried to Normandy by his father at the age of ten, he had passed thirty years at the Norman court, brought up by Norman nobles and priests, and trained to a guileless piety. He brought to England his French speech, customs, and friends.

"While living in Rouen he had become familiar with the Norman style. Now, in commissioning the abbey that was to be the shrine and tomb of England's genius, he bade or let it be designed in Norman Romanesque on the same lines as the magnificent abbey church which had been started only five yers before at Jumieges. Here again was a Norman conquest before William.

"Westminster Abbey was the beginning of an architectural efflorescence that would give England the finest Romanesque buildings in Europe.

"In that abbey Edward was laid to rest early in the fateful year 1066.

"On January 6 the assembled Witenagemot elected Harold king.

"He had hardly been crowned when news came that William, Duke of Normandy, cliamed the throne and was preparing war. Edward, said William, had in 1051 promised to bequeath him the English crown in gratitude for thirty years of protection in Normandy. Apparently the promise had been made but Edward, regretting or forgetting it, had shortly before his death, recommended Harold as his successor.

"In any case such a promise had no validity unless approveed by the Witan. But, said William, Harold, on a visit to him at Rouen (date now unknown) had accepted knighthood from him, had become William's 'man,' owed him submission according to feudal law, and had promised to recognize and support him as heir to Edward's throne. Harold admitted this pledge.

"But again no oath of his could bind the English nation. The representatives of that nation had freely chosen him for its king. Harold now resolved to defend that choice.

"William appealed to the Pope. Alexander II, counseled by Hildebrand, condemned Harold as a usurper, excommunicaated him and his adherents and declared William the lawful claimant of the English throne. He blessed William's proposed invasion and sent him a consecrated banner and a ring conaining, within a diamond, a hair of St. Peter's head.

"Hildebrand was glad to set a precedent for the papal disposition of thrones and deposition of kings. Ten years later he would apply the precedent to Henry IV of Germany. It would come in handy in 1213 with King John.

"His brother Tostig, long since exiled by the Witan, had not been recalld by Harold come to power. Tostig now allied himself with William, raised an army in the north, and persuaded King Harald Hardrada of Norway to join him by promising him the English throne.

"In September, 1066, as William's armada of 1400 vessels sailed from Normandy, Tostig and Hardrada invaded Northunberland. York surrendered to them and Hardrada was there crowned King of England. Harold rushed up with what troops he had and defeated the northern invaders at Stamford Bridge (September 25). In that battle Rostig and Hardrada died.

"Harold moved south with a diminished force far too small to pit against William's host and every adviser bade him to wait. But William was burning and harrowing southern England and Harold felt bound to defend the soil that he once had ravaged but now loved. At Senlac, near Hastings, the two armies met (October 14) and fought for nine hours.

"Harold, his eye pierced by an arrow, fell blinded with blood and was dismembered by Norman knights. One cut off his head, another a leg, another scattered Harold's entrails over the field. When the English saw their captain fallen, they fled. So great were the butchery and chaos that the monks who were later commissioned to find Harold's body could not discover him until they led to the scene Edith Swansneck who had been his mistress. She identified her lover's mutiliated body and the fragments were buried in the church at Waltham tht he had built.

"When the Romans retired from Britain, Wales resumed its freedom and suffered its own kings.

"In the fifth century western Wales was occupied by Irish settlers. Later Wales received thousands of Britons fleeing from the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of their island. The Anglo-Saxons stopped at the Welsh barrier and called the unsubdued people Wealhas -- 'foreigners.'

"The Irish and the Britons found in Wales a kindred Celtic stock and soon the three groups mingled as cymri -- 'fellow countrymen.' This became their national name and Cymru their name for their land.

"Like most Celtic peoples -- Bretons, Cornish, Irish, the Gaels of northern Scotland -- they based their social order almost wholly on the family and the clan and so jealously that they resented the state and looked with unappeasable distrust upon any individual or people of alien blood.

"Their clan spirit was balanced by uncalculating hospitality, their indiscipline by bravery, their hard life and climate by music and song and loyal friendship, their poverty by an imaginative sentiment that made every girl a princess and every second man a king."

Your comments, please?

"Two among them left enduring names. Taliesin and Aneurin, both of the sixth century. There were hundreds more. The tales they spun crossed the Channel to Brittany to reach polished form in France.

"The bards constituted a poetic clerical caste. No one was admitted to their order except after strict training in the lore of their race. The candidate for admission was called a mabinog. The material he studied was mabinogi, hence the name Mabinogion for such of their tales as have survived. In their present form they are not older than the fourteenth century, but probably they go back to this period when Christianity had not taken Wales.

"They are primitively simple, paganly animistic and weird with strange animals and marvelous events -- overcast with a somber certainty of exile, defeat, and death, yet in a mood of gentleness all the world away from the lust and violence of Icelandic Eddas, Norse sagas, and the Nibelungenlied.

"The learned Bishop Asser who served King Alfred as secretary and biographer came from the town and cathedral of St. David's in Pembrokeshire. These Christian shrines and settlements bore the brunt of pirate attacks from Normandy until King Rhodri the Great (844-78) drove them off and gave the island a vigorous dynasty. King Hywel the Good (910-50) united all Wales and provided it with a uniform code of laws.

"Normally these kingdoms fought among themselves for lack of transport to widen spheres of strife.

"From the third century onward we hear of Irish raids and settlements on west British coasts. The chroniclers call these raiders Scots -- apparently a Celtic word for wanderers. Throughout this period 'Scot' means Irishman.

"War wss endemic. Until 590 the women, until 804 the monks and priests, were required to fight alongside more ordinary warriors. A code of law, essentially similar to the 'barbarian' codes of the Continent was administered by brehons -- highly trained lawyer judges who, as early as the fourth century, taught law schools and wrote legal treatises in the Gaelic tongue.

"Ireland, like Scotland, missed conquest by Rome and therefore missed the boon of Roman law and orderly government. Law never quite succeeded in replacing vengeance with judgment or passion with discipline.

"Government remained basically tribal and only at moments achievd a national unity and scope.

"The unit of society and economy was the family.

"Several families made a sept, several septs a clan, several clans a tribe. All membes of a tribe were supposedly descended from a common ancestor. In the tenth century many families prefixed Ui or O' (grandson) to a tribal name to indicate their descent. So the O'Neils claimed descent from Niall Glundubh, King of Ireland in 916. Many others assumed their father's name, merely prefixing Mac -- i.e. son.

"Most of the land in the seventh century was owned in common by clans or septs. Private property was limited to household goods but by the tenth century individual ownership had spread. Soon there was a small aristocracy holding large estates, a numerous class of free peasants, a small class of renters, a still smaller class of slaves.

"Monks and priests and nuns opened schools of every scope and degree. One at Clonard, established in 520, had 3000 students (if we may believe patriotic historians). There were others at Clonmacnois (544), Clonfert (550), and Bangor (560).

"Several gave a twelve year course leading to the doctorate in philosophy and including Biblical studies, theology, the Latin and Greek classics, Gaelic grammar and literature, mathematics and astronomy, history and music, medicine and law. Poor scholars whose parents could not support them were maintained by public funds for most students were preparing for the priesthood and the Irish made every sacrifice to further that vocation. These schools continued the study of Greek long after knowledge of that language had almost disappeared from the other countries of Western Europe.

"Alcuin studied at Clonmacnois. In Ireland John Scotus Erigena learned the Greek that made him the marvel of the court of Charles the Bald in France.

"The mood and literature of the age favored legend and romance.

"Here and there some minds turned to science, like the astronomer Dungal, or the geometer Fergil, who taught the sphericity of the earth.

"About 825 the geographer Dieuil reported the discovery of Iceland by Irish monks in 795, and exemplified the midnight day of the Irish summer by noting that one could then find light enough to pick the fleas from his shirt.

"Grammarians were numerous, if only because Irish prosody was the most complicated of its time. Poets abounded and held high state in society. Usually they combined the functions of teacher, lawyer, poet, and historian. Grouped in bardic schools around some leading poet, they inherited many of the powers and prerogatives of the pre-Christian Druid priets. Such bardic schools flourished without a break from the sixth to the seventeenth century, usually supported by grants of land from Church or state.

"It was the Book of Kells' -- the Four Gospels in vellum, done by Irish monks at Kells in Meath or on the isle of Iona in the ninth century and now the prize possession of Trinity College, Dublin.

"Through the slow intercommunication of monks across frontiers, Byzantine and Islamic styles of illumination entered Ireland and for a moment reached perfection there. Here, as in Moslem miniatures, human or animal figures played an insignificant role. None was worth half an initial. The spirit of this art lay in taking a letter, or a single ornamental motive, out of a background of blue or gold and drawing it out with fanciful humor and delight until it almost covered the page with its labyrinthine web.

"Nothing in Christian illuminated manuscripts surpasses the Book of Kells. Gerald of Wales, although always jealous of Ireland, called it the work of angels masquerading as men.

"As this golden age of Ireland had been made possible by freedom from the Germanic invasions that threw the rest of Latin Europe back by many centuries, so it was ended by such Norse raids as in the ninth and tenth centuries annulled in France and England the progress so laboriously made by Charlemagne and Alfred. Perhaps the news had reached Norway and Denmark -- both still pagan -- that the Irish monasteries were rich in gold, silver, and jewelry and that the political fragmentation of Ireland forestalled united resistance.

"An experimental raid came in 795, did little damage, but confirmed the rumor of this unguarded prey. In 823 greater invasions plundered Cork and Cloyne, destroyed the monasteries of Bangor and Moville, and massacred the clergy. Thereafter raids came almost every year. Sometimes brave little armies drove them back but they returned and sacked monasteries everywhere.

"Bands of Norse invaders settled near the coast, founded Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford, and levied tribute from the northern half of the island. Their King Thorgest made St. Patrick's Armagh his pagan capital and enthroned his heathen wife on the altar of St. Kieran's Curch of Clonmacnois. The Irish kings fought the invaders separately but at the same time they fought one another. Malachi, King of Meath, captured Thorgest and drowned him (845).

"In 851 Olaf the White, a Norwegian prince, established the kingdom of Dublin which remained Norse until the twelfth century. An age of learning and poetry gave way to an era of ruthless war in which Christian as well as pagan soldiers pillaged and fired monasteries, destroyed ancient manuscipts and scattered the art of centuries.

"In the eleventh century art and literature revived. The Book of Leinster and the Book of Hymns almost equaled the Book of Kells in splendor of illumination. Historians and scholars flourished in the monastic schools.

"But the Irish spirit had not yet been tamed.The nation again divided into hostile kingdoms and spent its strength in civil war.

"Three others peoples contested the possession of this ancient 'Caledonia' -- the Picts, a Celtic tribe, established above the Firth of Forth -- the Britons, refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, settled between the River Derwent and the Firth of Clyde -- and the Angles or English between the River Tyne and the Firth of Forth

"The intensity of their class conflicts was rivaled only by their proud loyalty to their clan and their tenacious resistance to foreign foes. Rome failed to conquer them. On the contrary, neither Hadrian's Wall between the Solway and the Tyne (A.D. 120), nor that of Antoninus Pius, sixty miles father north between the Firths of Forth and Clyde (140), nor the campaigns of Septimius Severus (208) or Theodosius (368) availed to end the periodical invasion of Britain by the hungry Picts.

"In 617 the Saxons under Edwin, King of Northumbria, captured the hill stronghold of the Picts and named it Ed(win)burgh.

"In 844 Kenneth MacAlpin united the Picts and Scots under his crown.

"In 954 the tribes recaptured Edinburgh and made it their capital.

"In 1018 Malcolm II conquered Lothian (the region north of the Tweed) and merged it with the realm of the Picts and Scots.

"Duncan's defeat by the English at Durham gave an opening to his general Macbeth, who claimed the throne because his wife Gruoch was granddaughter of Kenneth III.

"Macbeth murdered Duncan (1040), reigned for seventeen years, and was murdered by Duncan's son Malcolm III.

"Of seventeen kings who ruled Scotland from 844 to 1057, twelve died by assassination. It was a violent age of bitter struggle for food and water, freedom and power.

"In those dour years Scotland had little time for the frills and graces of civilization. Three centuries were to pass before Scotland literature would begin.

"An early chieftain, Dan Mikillati, gave his name to Denmark -- Dan's march or province.

"The ancient tribe of Suiones, described by Tacitus as dominating the great peninsula, left their name in Sweden (Sverige), and in many kings called Sweyn.

"Norway (Norge) was simply the northern way.

"Skane, the name given to Sweden by the elder Pliny, became in Latin Scandia and begot the Scandinavia that now covers three nations of kindred blood and mutually intelligible speech. In all three countries the fertility of women, or the imagination of men, outran the fertility of the soil.

"The young or discontent took to their boats and prowled about the coasts for food, slaves, wives, or gold. Their hunger acknowledged no laws and no frontiers.

"Gorm (860-935) gave Denmark unity.

"His son Harald Bluetooth (945-85) gave it Christianity.

"Sweyn Forkbeard (985-1014) conquered England and made Denmark for a generation one of the gret powers of Europe.

"King Olaf Skottkonung (994-1022) made Sweden Christian and Uppsala his capital. In 800 Norway was a conglormeration of thirty-one principalities, separated by mountains, rivers, or fjords and each ruled by a warrior chief.

"About 850 one such leader, Halfdan the Black, from his capital at Trondheim, subdued most of the others, and became Norway's first king.

"His son Harald Haarfager (860-933) was challenged by rebellious chierftains. The Gyda whom he wooed refused to marry him until he should conquer all Norway. He vowed never to clip or comb his hair until it was done. He accomplished it in ten years, married Gyda and nine other women, cut his hair, and received his distinguishing name -- the Fair-haired.

"One of his many sons, Haakon the Good (935-61), ruled Norway well for twenty-seven years. 'Peace lasted so long,' complained a Viking warrior, 'that I was afraid I might come to die of old age within doors on a bed.'

"Another Haakon -- 'the Great Earl' -- governed Norway ably for thirty years (965-95). In his old age he offended the 'bonders' or free peasants by taking their daughters as concubines and sending them home after a week or two.

"Says a passage in Beowulf, 'In him who well considers, nothing can stifle kinship.' Unwanted children were exposed to die but once accepted, the child received a judicious compound of discipline and love.

"There were no family names. Each son merely added his father's name to his own:-Olaf Haraldson, Magnus Olafsson, Haakon Magmusson.

"Long before Christianity came to them, the Scandinavians, in naming a child, poured water over him as a symbol of admission into the family.

"Education was practical. Girls learned the arts of the home, including the brewing of ale. Boys learned to swim, ski, work wood and metal, wrestle, row, skate, play hockey (from Danaish Hoek, hook), hunt, and fight with bow and arrow, sword or spear. Jumping was a favorite exercise. Some Norwegians, fully armed and armored, could jump above their own height or swim for miles. Some could run faster than the fleetest horse.

"Many children learned to read and write. Some were trained in medicine or law.

"Both sexes sang lustily. A few in either sex played musical instruments, usually the harp. We read in the Elder Edda how King Gunnar could play the harp with his toes and charm snakes with its tones.

"Polygamy was practiced by the rich until the thirteenth century.

"Marriages were arranged by the parents, often through purchase. The free woman could veto such an arrangement but if she married against the will of her parents her husband was declared an outlaw and might legally be slain by her relatives. A man could divorce his wife at will but unless he gave good reson he too was subject to assassination by her family.

"Either mate might divorce the other for dressing like the opposite sex -- as when the wife wore breeches or the man wore a shirt open at the breast. A husband might kill with impunity -- i.e. without provoking a blood feud -- any man whom he caught in illicit relations with his wife. Women worked hard but they remained sufficiently delectable to stir men on to kill one another for their sakes and men dominant in public life were, as everywhere, recessive at home.

"In general the position of woman was higher in pagan than in later Christian Scandinavia. She was the mother not of sin but of strong brave men.

"Kings were chosen from royal blood, the provincial governors from the jarls. Along with this frank acceptance of monarchy and aristocracy as natural concomitants of war and agriculture, went a remarkable democracy by which the landowners acted as legislators and judges in a local hus-thing or meeting of householders, a village mot, a provincial thing or assembly and a national alithing or parliament.

"It was a government of laws and not merely of men. Violence was the exception, judgment the rule. Feud revenge incarnadined the sagas but even in their Viking Age of blood and iron the wergild was replacing private vengeance and only the sea-rovers were men with no law but victory or defeat.

"Harsh punishments were used to persuade to order and peace men hardened by the struggle with nature. Adulterers were hanged or trodden to death by horses. Incendiaries were burned at the stake. Patricides were suspended by the heels next to a live wolf simiarly hung. Rebels against the government were torn asunder by horses driven apart or were dragged to death behind a wild bull.

"Perhaps in these barbarities the law had not yet replaced but only socialized revenge. Even piracy at last gave way to law. The robbers subsided into traders and substituted wits for force. Much of the sea law of Europe is Norse in origin, transmitted through the Hanseatic League.

"The gods of the Teutonic pantheon were not mythology to the Norse but actual divinities feared or loved and intimately connected with mankind by a thousand miracles and amours.

"In the wonder and terror of primitive souls all the forces and major embodiments of nature had become personal deities and the more powerful of these required a sedulous propitiation that did not stop short of human sacrifice.

"It was a crowded Valhalla. Twelve gods and telve goddesses -- divers giants (Jotuns), fates (Norns), and Valkyries -- messengers and ale-bearers of the gods. And a sprinkling of witches, elves, and trolls.

"The gods were magnified mortals, subject to birth, hunger, sleep, sickness, passion, sorrow, death. They excelled men only in size, longevity and power. Odin (German Woden), the father of all the gods, had lived near the Sea of Azov in Caesar's time. There he had built Asgard, or the Garden of the Gods, for his family and his counselors. Suffering from land hunger, he conquered north Europe.

"He was not unchallenged nor omnipotent. Loki scolded him like a fishwife and Thor quite ignored him. He wandered over the earth seeking wisdom and bartered an eye for a drink at wisdom's well. Then he invented letters, taught his people writing, poetry, and the arts, and gave them laws.

"Those men who died basely were thrust down into the realms of Hel, the goddess of the dead.

"Those who died in battle were led by the Valkyries to Valhalla -- 'Hall of the Chosen.' There, as favorite sons of Odin, they were reincarnated in strength and beauty to spend their days in manly battle and their nights in drinking ale.

"But (says late Norse mythology) the time came when the Joruns -- monstrous demons of disorder and destruction -- declared war upon the gods and fought with them to mutual extinction. In this Twilight of the Gods all the universe fell to ruin -- not merely sun and planets and stars but, at the last, Valhalla itself and all its warriors and deities.

"Only Hope survived -- that in the movement of slow time a new earth would form, a new heaven, a better justice, and a higher god than Odin or Thor.

"The oldest form in which it has come down to us is in those strange poems to which error has given the name of Edda. In 1643 a bishop discovered in the Royal Library of Copenhagen a manuscript containing some old Icelandic poems. By a double mistake he called them the Edda of Saemund the Wise (c.1056-1133), an Icelandic scholar-priest.

"It is now generally agreed that the poems were composed in Norway, Iceland, and Greenland by unknown authors at unknown dates between the eighth and twelfth centuries, that Saemund may have collected, but did not write, them and that Edda was not their name.

"But time sanctions error as well as theft and compromises by calling the poems the Poetic or Elder Edda. Most of them are narrtive ballads of the old Scandinavian or Germanic heroes or gods. Here for the first time we meet with Sigurd the Volsung and other heroes, heroines, and villains destined to take more definite form in the Volsungasaga and the Nibelungenlied.

"Nevertheless the hard conditions of early Scandinavia compelled a struggle for existence in which only men of the toughest fiber could survive. A Nietzschean ethic of unscrupulous courage rose out of ancient customs of feud and revenge and the lawless piracy of ungoverned seas. One Viking asked of another:-'Tell me what faith you are of.' Came the reply:-'I believe in my own strength.'

"Gold Harald wanted the throne of Norway and proposed to get it by force. His friend Haakon advised him:-'Consider with thyself what thou art man enough to undertake, for to accomplish such a purpose requires a man bold and firm who will stick at neither good nor evil to accomplish what is intended.'

"Some of these men found such pleasure in battle as almost anesthetized their wounds. Some went into a battle frenzy known as berserksgangr -- 'the berserk's way.' The berserkers -- 'bear shirters' -- were champions who rushed into combat without shirts of mail and fought and howled like animals, bit their shields in fury and then, the battle over, fell into a coma of exhaustion.

"Only the brave would enter Valhalla and all sins would be forgiven to him who died for his group in war.

"So trained in hardship and wild games, the 'men of the fjords' rowed out and conquered kingdoms for themselves in Russia, Pomerania, Frisia, Normandy, England, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Italy, and Sicily.

"These ventures were not invasions by masses of soldiery like the Moslem hijad or the Magyar flood. They were the reckless sallies of mere handfuls of men who thought all weakness criminal and all strength good, who hungered for land, women, wealth, and power and felt a divine right to share in the fruits of the earth.

"They began like pirates and ended like statesmen. Rollo gve a creative order to Normandy. William the Conqueror to England, Roger II to Sicily. They mingled their fresh blood of the north, like an energizing hormone, with that of peoples made torpid by rural routine.

"The exodus of great tribes -- Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, Lombards -- had left Germany underpopulated for a time. The Slavic Wends moved westward from the Baltic states to fill the vacuum.

"By the sixth century the Elbe was the ethnic, as it is at present the political frontier, between the Slavic and the Eastern world. West of the Elbe and the Saale were the surviving German tribes -- Saxons in north central Germany -- East Franks along the lower Rhine -- Thuringians between them -- Bavarians (once Marcomanni) the middle Danube -- and Swabians (once Suevi) along and between the upper Rhine and upper Danube, and along the eastern Jura and the northern Alps.

"There was no Germany, only German tribes.

"The Treaty of Mersen (870) gave him additional territory and defined Germany as the land between the Rhine and the Elbe, plus part of Lorraine and the bishoprics of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer.

"Louis was a statesman of the first order, but he had three sons. On his death (876) his realm was divided among them.

"After a decade of chaos, during which the Northmen raided the Rhine cities, Arnulf, illegitimate offspring of Louis's son Carloman, was elected king of 'East Francia' (887) and drove back the invaders.

"But his successor, Louis 'the Child' (899-911) proved too young and weak to hold back the Magyars who ravaged Bavaria (900), Carinthia (901), Saxony (906), Thuringia (908) and Alemannia (909).

"The central government failed to protect these provinces. Each had to provide its own defense. The provincial dukes organized armies by giving lands in fief to retainers who paid in military service. The forces so raised gave the dukes virtual independence of the crown and established a feudal Germany. On the death of Louis the nobles and prelates, successfully claiming the right of choosing the king, gave the throne to Conrad I, Duke of Franconia (911-=18).

"Conrad spent himself in strife with Duke Henry of Saxony but had the wit to recommend Henry as his successor.

"He was twenty-four at his accession but was already a king in bearing and ability. Sensing the value of ceremony and symbolism, he persuaded the dukes of Lorraine, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria to act as his attendants in his solemn coronation at Aachen by Archbishop Hildeberr.

"Later the dukes rebelled against his growing power and induced his younger brother Henry to join in a plot to depose him. Otto discovered and suppressed the conspiracy and forgave Henry who conspired again and was again forgiven.

"The subtle King gve new duchies to his friends and relatives and gradually subordinated the dukes. Later monarchs would not inherit his resolution and skill and much of medieval Germany was consumed in conflict between feudalism and royalty.

"In this contest the German prelates sided with the King and became his administrative aides and counselors, sometimes his generals. The King appointed bishops and achbishops as he named other officials at the government. The German Church became a national institution only loosely attached to the papacy.

"He compelled the king of Denmark and the dukes of Poland and Bohemia to accept him as their feudal suzerain. Aspiring to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, he welcomed the invitation of Adelaide, the pretty widow of King Lothaire of Italy, to rescue her from the indignities to which she had been subjected by the new King Berengar II.

"Otto combined politics deftly with romance. He invaded Italy, married Adelaide, and allowed Berengar to retain his kingdom only as a fief of the German crown (951). The Roman aristocracy refused to acknowledge a German as emperor and therefore as master of Italy.

"Now began a contest that would last for three centuries. The rebellion of his son Laudolf and his son-in-law Conrad called Otto back to Germany, lest in trying to become emperor he should cease to be king. When the Magyars again invaded Germany (954), Ludolf and Conrad welcomed them and supplied them with guides. Otto put down the rebellion, forgave Ludolf, reorganized his army, and so decisively defeated the Magyars at the Lechfeld, near Augsburg (955), that Germany won a long period of security and peace.

"Otto invaded Italy with a strong force, entered Rome peaceably and was crowned Roman Emperor of the West by John XII in 962. The Pope, regretting this action, complained that Otto had not fulfilled a promise to restore the Ravenna exarchate to the papacy. Otto took the extreme step of marching into Rome, summoning a synod of Italian bishops and persuading it to depose John and make a layman Pope as Leo VIII (963).

"The papal territory was now confined to the duchy of Rome and the Sabine region. The rest of central and northern Italy was absorbed into a Holy Roman Empire that became an appanage of the German crown.

"From these events German kings would conclude that Italy was part of their inheritance and the popes would conclude that no man could become Roman emperor of the West except by papal coronation.

"Otto, nearing death, forestalled disorder by having his son Otto II crowned coemperor by Pope John XIII (967). He secured as his son's wife Theophano, daughter of Romanus II the Byzantine Emperor (972). Charlemagne's dream of a marital union of the two empires was transiently made real.

"Then, old in deeds but still only sixty years of age, Otto passed away (973) and all Germany mourned him as its greatest king. Otto II (973-83) spent himself in efforts to add southern Italy to his realm and died prematurely in the attempt.

"Otto III (983-1002) was then a boy of three. His mother Theophano and his grandmother Adelaide ruled as regents for eight years.

"Influenced by Gerberr and other churchmen, he proposed to make Rome his capital and unite all Christendom under a restored Roman Empire, ruled jointly by emperor and pope.

"The nobles and populace of Rome and Lombardy interpreted the plan as a conspiracy to establish a German-Byzantine rule over Italy. They resisted Otto and established a 'Roman Republic.' Otto suppressed it and executed its leader Crescentius. In 999 he made Gerberr Pope.

"But the twenty-two years of Otto's life, and the four years of Gerberr's papacy, proved too brief for the implementation of his policy. Half a saint but in some measure a man, Otto fell in love with Stephania, a widow of Crescentius. She consented to be his mistress and poisoner.

"The young king, feeling death in his veins, became a weeping penitent and died at Viterbo at the age of twenty-two.

"Henry II (1002-24), last of the Saxon line of German kings, labored to restore the power of the monarch in Italy and Germany where the reigns of two boys had strengthened the dukes and emboldened neighboring states.

"Conrad II (1024-39), beginning the Franconian or Salian line of emperors, pacified Italy and added to Germany the kingdom of Burgundy or Arles. Needing funds, he sold bishoprics for sums so large that his conscience irked him. He swore never again to take money for an ecclesiastical appointment and almost succeeded in keeping his oath.

"His son Henry III (1039-56) brought the new empire to its zenith. On the 'Day of Indulgence' at Constance in 1043, he offerd pardon to all those who had injured him and exhorted his subjects to renounce all vengeance and hatred.

"For a decade his preaching and example -=- perhaps also his power -- reduced the feuds of the dukes and co-operated with the contemporary 'Truce of God' to bring a brief golden age to Central Europe. He patronized learning, founded schools, and completed the cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz and Worms.

"But he was no saint pledged to eternal peace. He warred with Hungary until it recognized him as its feudal suzerain. He deposed three rival claimants to the papacy and apointed two successive popes. In all Europe no other power equaled his.

"The forests were fearfully immense, harbored wild animals, impeded communication and unity. Nameless heroes of the woodland felled the trees -- perhaps too recklessly. In Saxony the struggle against the self-regenerating forest and the infectious marsh went on for a thousand years and only the thirteenth century gave man the victory.

"Generation after generation the hardy hearty peasants pushed back the beasts and the wilderness, tamed the land with mattock and plow, planted fruit trees, herded flocks, tended vines, and consoled their loneliness with love and prayer, flowers and music and beer.

"Miners dug salt, iron, copper, lead, and silver from the earth. Manorial, monastic, and domestic handicraft wedded Roman to German skills.

"Trade flowed ever more busily over the rivers and into the North and Baltic Seas. At last the great campaign was won.

"Barbarism still lurked in the laws and the blood. But the gap had been spanned between the tribal chaos of the fifth century and the Ottonian renaissance of the tenth. From 955 to 1075 Germany was the most prosperous country in Europe, rivaled only by that northern Italy which had received law and order from German kings.

"Old Roman towns lke Trier, Mainz and Cologne carried on, new cities grew around the episcopal seats at Speyer, Magdeburg and Worms.

"Monastic schools -- really colleges -- were opened at Fulda, Tegernsee, Reichenau, Gandersheim, Hildesheim, and Lorsch. Rabanus Maurus (776?-856), after studying under Aleuin at Tours, became abbot of the great monastery at Fulda in Prussia and made its school famous throughout Europe as the mother of scholars and of twenty-two affiliated institutions. He extended the curriculum to include many sciences and reproved the superstitions that ascribed natural events to occult powers.

"The library at Fulda grew to be one of the largest in Europe. To it we owe Suetonius, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus.

"An uncertain tradition attributes to Rabanus the majestic hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus which is sung at the consecreation of popes, bishops, or kings.

"St. Bruno, who was both the Duke of Lorraine and the Archbishop of Cologne, and became imperial chancellor under Otto, the Great, opened a school in the royal palace to train an administrative class. He brought scholars and books from Byzantium and Italy and himself taught Greek and philosophy.

"The German language had as yet no literature.

"Nearly all writing was done by clerics and in Latin. The greatest German poet of the age was Salafrid Strabo (809-49), a Swabian monk at Reicherian. For a time h was tutor to Charles the Bald in the palace of Louis the Pious at Aachen. He found an enlightened patron in Louis' wife, the beauitiful and ambitious Judith.

"His greatest rival in the literature of Germany in these centuries was a nun.

"Hroswitha was only one of many German women who in this age were distinguished for culture and refinement. Born about 935, she entered the Benedictine convent at Gandersheim. The standard of instruction must have been higher than we should have expected for Hroswitha became familiar with the poets of pagan Rome and learned to write Latin fluently. She composed some lives of saints in Latin hexameters and a minor epic about Otto the Great.

"But the works that make her memorable are six Latin prose comedies in the manner of Terence. Her purpose, she tells us, was 'to make the small talent vouchsafed her by Heaven give forth, under the hammer of devotion, a faint sound to the praise of God.' She mourns the pagan indecency of Latin comedy and proposed to offer a Christian substitute. But even her plays turn on a profane love that hardly conceals a warm undercurrent of physical desire.

"Church architecture now graduated from wood to stone imported from Lombardy Romanesque ideas of transept, choir, apse, and towers and began the cathedrals of Hildesheim, Lorsch, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Speyer, and cologne.

"Its founder, Benedict of Nursia, was born at Spolero, apparently of the dying Roman aristocracy. Sent to Rome for an education, he was scandalized by the sexual license there or, some say, he loved and lost. At the age of fifteen he fled to a remote spot five miles from Subiaco in the Sabine hills, made his cell in a cave at the foot of a precipice, and lived there for some years as a solitary monk.

"The Dialogues of Pope Gregory I tell how Benedict fought valiantly to forget the woman

'the memory of whom the wicked spirit put into his mind and by that memory so mightily inflamed with concupiscence the soul of God's servant that, almost overcome with plesure, he was of a mind to forsake the wilderness. But suddenly, assisted by God's grace, he came to himself. Seeing many thick briers and nestle bushes growing hard by, off he cast his apparel, and threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that when he rose up all his flesh was pitifully torn. So by the wounds of his body he cured the wounds of hs soul.'

"After he had lived there for some years and his steadfastness had won him fame, he was importuned by the monks of a nerby monastery to be their abbot. He warned them that his rule would be severe. They persisted and he went with them. After a few months of his stern regimen they put poison in his wine.

"He resumed his solitary life but young devotees came to live near him and solicit his guidance. Fathers brought their sons, even from Rome, to be taught by him.

"By 520 twelve little monasteries, each with twelve monks, had risen around his cave. When of even these monks many found his rule too strict, he removed with the most ardent of his followers to Monte Cassino, a hill 1715 feet above sea level, overlooking the ancient town of Casinum, forty miles northwest of Capua.

"Both the climate and the active spirit of Western Europe made such a regimen discouragingly difficult and led to many relapses. Benedict did not criticize the anchorites nor condemn asceticism but he thought it wiser to make asceticism communal, not individual.

"There whould be no show or rivalry in it. At every step it was to be under an abbot's control and stop short of injury to health or mind.

"Hitherto, in the West, no vows had been demanded of those who entered the monastic life.

"Benedict felt that the aspirant should serve a novitiate and learn by experience the austerities to be required of him. Only after such a trial might he take the vows. Then, if he still wished, he was to pledge himself in writing to 'the perpetuity of his stay, the reformation of his manners, and obedience.'

"And this vow, signed and witnessed, was to be laid upon the altar by the novice himself in a solemn ritual. Thereafter the monk must not leave the monastery without the abbot's permission. The abbot was to be chosen by the monks and was to consult them on all matters of importance. The final decision was to rest with him and they were to obey hm in silence and humility. They were to speak only when necessary. They were not to jest or laugh loudly. They were to walk with their eyes on the ground. They were to own nothing 'neither a book, nor tablets, or a pen -- nothing at all. All things shall be held in common.'

"Conditions of previous wealth or slavery were to be ignored and forgotten. The abbot

'shall make no distinction of persons in the monastery. A freeborn man shall not be preferred to one coming from servitude unless there be some other and reasonable cause. For whether we be bond or free, we are all one in Christ. God is no respecter of persons.'

"Nothing was to be eaten until noon and in Lent not until sundown. From mid-September to Easter, there was to be but one meal a day. In the summer months, two, for then the days were long. Wine was allowed but no flesh of any four-footed beast.

"Work or sleep was to be frquently interrupted with communal prayer. Influenced by Eastern exemplars, Benedict divided the day into 'canonical hours' -- hours of prayer as established by canon or rule.

"The monks were to rise at two a.m., repair to the chapel and recite or sing 'nocturns' -- scriptural readings, prayers, and psalms. At dawn they gathered for 'matins' or 'lauds'. At six for 'prime' -- the first hour. At nine for 'tierce' -- the third. At noon for 'sext' -- the sixth. At three for 'none' -- the ninth. At sunset for vespers -- the evening hour. At bedtime for 'compline' -- the completion. Bedtime was nightfall. The monks almost dispensed with artificial light.

"They slept in their clothes and seldom bathed.

"To these specific regulations Benedict added some general counsels of Christian perfection - - -

"It took dispossessed or ruined peasants, students longing for some quiet retreat, men weary of the strife and tumult of the world and said to them:-'Give up your pride and freedom and find here security and peace.'

"No wonder a hundred similar Benedictine monasteries rose throughout Europe, each independent of the rest, all subject only to the pope, serving as communistic isles in a raging individualistic sea. The Benedictine Rule and order proved to be among the most enduring creations of medieval man.

"Monte Cassino itself is a symbol of that permanence.

"Lombard barbarians sacked it in 589.

"The Lombards retired.

"The monks returned.

"The Saracens destroyed it in 884.

"The monks rebuilt it.

"Earthquake ruined it in 1349.

"The monks restored it.

"French soldiery pillaged it in 1799. The shells and bombs of the Second World War leveled it to the ground in 1944.

"Urban economy was in chaos. Political institutions lay in ruins. In Rome no secular authority survived except that of imperial legates weakly supported by uunpaid and distant troops.

"In this collapse of worldly powers the survival of ecclesiastical organization appeared even to the emperors as the salvation of the state. In 554 Justinian promulgated a decree requiring that 'fit and proper persons, able to administer the local government, be chosen as governors of the provinces by the bishops and chief persons of each province.'

"But Justinian's corpse was hardly cold when the Lombard invasion (568) subjected northern Italy again to barbarism and Arianism and threatened the whole structure and leadership of the Church in Italy.

"The crisis calld forth a man and history once more testified to the influence of genius.

"Gregory was born at Rome three years before Benedict's death.

"He came of an ancient senatorial family and his youth was spent in a handsome palace on the Caelian Hill. On the death of his father he fell heir to a large fortune. He rose rapidly in the ordo honorum or sequence of political plums.

"At thirty-three he was prefect -- as we should say, mayor -- of Rome. But he had no taste for politics. Having finished his year of office, and apparently convinced by the condition of Italy that the ever-heralded end of the world was at hand, he used the greater part of his fortune to found seven monasteries, distributed the rest in alms to the poor, laid aside all vestiges of his rank, turned his palace into the monastery of St. Andrew, and became its first monk.

"He subjected himself to extreme asceticism, lived for the most part on raw vegetables and fruits and fasted so often that when Holy Saturday came, on which fasting was pre-eminently enjoined, it seemed that another day of abstinence would kill him.

"Amid the wiles of diplomacy and the pomp of palaces he continued to live like a monk in habit, diet and prayer.

"Nevertheless he gained some helpful experience of the world and the chicanery. In 586 he was recalled to Rome and became Abbot of St. Andrew's.

"In 590 a terrible bubonic plague decimated the population of Rome. Pelagius himself was a victim. At once the clergy and people of the city chose Gregory to succeed him.

"Gregory was loath to leave the monastery and wrote to the Greek emperor asking him to refuse confirmation of the election. The city prefect intercepted the letter. As Gregory was preparing flight he was seized and brought by force to St. Peter's and there was consecrated Pope.

"So we are told by another Gregory.

"He was now fifty and already bald with large head, dark complexion, aquiline nose, sparse and tawny beard, a man of strong feeling and gentle speech, of imperial purposes and simple sentiment.

"Austerities and resonsibilities had ruined his health. He suffered from indigestion, slow fever, and gout. In the papal palace he lived as he had in the monastery -- dressed in a monk's course robe, eating the cheapest foods, sharing a common life with the monks and priests who aided him.

"Usually absorbed in problems of religion and the state, he could unbend into words and deeds of paternal affection. A wandering minstrel appeared at the gate of the palace with organ and monkey. Gregory bade the man enter and gave him food and drink.

"Instead of spending the revenues of the Church in bulding new edifices, he used them in charity, in gifts to religious institutions throughout Christendom and in redeeming captives of war. To every poor family in Rome he distributed monthly a portion of corn, wine, cheese, vegetables, oil, fish, meat, clothing, and money. and every day his agents brought cooked provisions to the sick and infirm.

His letters, stern to negligent eccelesiastics or to political potentates, are jewels of sympathy to persons in distress. To a peasant exploited on Church lands, to a slave girl wishing to take the veil, to a noble lady worried about her sins.

"In his conception the priest was literally a pastor, a shepherd caring for hs flock and the good Pope had every right to compose his Liber pastoralis curae (590), a manual of advice to bishops which became a Christian classic. Though always ailing and prematurely old, he spent hiself in ecclesiastical administration, papal politics, agricultural management, military strategy, theological treatises, mystic ecstasies, and a solicitous concern with a thousand details of human life.

"In the few years of peace allowed him he turned happily to the task of spreading the Gospel through Europe. He brought the rebellious bishops of Lombardy to submission, restored orthodox Catholicism in Africa, received the conversion of Arian Spain and won England with forty monks.

"While Abbot of St. Andrew's he had seen some English captives exposed for sale in a slave market at Rome. He was struck, says the patriotic Bede, by their white skin and comely countenance and hair of excellent beauty. And beholding them awhile he demanded, as they say, out of what region or land they had been brought. And it was answered that they came from Britain where such was the appearance of the inhabitants.

"Again, he asked whether the people of that island were Christian men and answer was made that they were paynims. Then this good man...quoth he:-'alas it is a piteous case that the author of darkness possessseth such bright beautied people and that men of such gracious outward sheen do bear a mind void of inward grace.'

"Again, therefore, he enquired what was the name of that people. Answer was given that they were called Angles. Whereon he said:-'Well are they so called , for they have an angel's face, and it is meet that such men were inheritors with the angels in heaven.'

"The story -- too pretty to be credible -- goes on to say that Gregory asked and received of Pope Pelagius II permission to lead some missionaries to England, that Gregory started out, but was halted by a locust dropping upon the page of Scripture that he was reading. He cried:-'Locusta! That means loco sta' -- stay in your place.

Impressed soon afterward into the papacy, he did not forget England. In 596 he sent thither a mission under Augustine, Prior of St. Andrew's. Arrived in Gaul, the monks were turned back by Frank stories of Saxon savagery. Those 'angels', they were informed 'were wild beasts who preferred killing to eating, thirsted for human blood and liked Christian blood best of all.

"He takes the drama as literal history in every line. But also he seeks in every line an allegorical or symbolical significance and ends by finding in Job the full Augustinian theology.

"The Bible is in every sense the word of God. It is a complete system of wisdom and beauty in itslf. No man should waste his time and debase his morals by reading the pagan classics.

"However, the Bible is occasionally obscure and is oftehn couched in popular or pictorial language. It needs careful interpretation by trained minds. The Church, as custodian of sacred tradition, is the only proper interpreter.

"Individual reason is a weak and divisive instrument, not designed to deal with supernatural ralities. 'When the intllect seeks to understand beyond its powers, it loses even that which it understood.'

"God is beyond our understanding. We can only say what He is not, not what He is. 'Almost everything that is said of God is unworthy for the very reason tht it is capable of being said.'

"Hence Gregory makes no formal attempt to prove the existnce of God. But, he argues, we can adumbrate Him by considering the human soul. Is it not the living force and guide of the body? Says Gregory:-'Many of our time have often seen souls departing from the body.'

"The tragedy of man is that by original sin his nature is corrupt and inclines him to wickedness. This basic spiritual malformation is transmitted from parent to child through sexual procreation. Left to himself, man would heap sin upon sin and richly deserve everlasting damnation.

"Hell is no mere phrase. It is a dark and bottomless subterranean abyss created from the beginning of the world. It is an inextinguishable fire, corporeal and yet able to sear soul as well as flesh. It is eternal and yet it never destroys the damned, or lessens their sensitivity to pain. And to each moment of pain is added the terror of expected pain, the horror of witnessing the tortures of love ones also damned, the despair of every being released or allowd the blessing annihilation.

"In a softer mood Gregory developed Augustine's doctrine of a purgatory in which the dead would complete their atonement for forgiven sins.