lowlands. The second were towns which grew up
slowly for purposes of trade by fords of rivers or
at ports: such are Oxeneford, Oxford; Bedcanford,
Bedford (a British town); Stretford, Stratford; and
Wealingaford, Wallingford. The third were the
towns which grew up in the wastes and wealds, with
names of varied form but more modern origin. As
a whole, it may be said that during the entire early
English period the names of cities were mostly Roman,
the names of villages and country towns were mostly
English.
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE.
Nothing better illustrates the original peculiarities
and subsequent development of the early English mind
than the Anglo-Saxon literature. A vast mass
of manuscripts has been preserved for us, embracing
works in prose and verse of the most varied kind;
and all the most important of these have been made
accessible to modern readers in printed copies.
They cast a flood of light upon the workings of the
English mind in all ages, from the old pagan period
in Sleswick to the date of the Norman Conquest, and
the subsequent gradual supplanting of our native literature
by a new culture based upon the Romance models.
All national literature everywhere begins with rude
songs. From the earliest period at which the
English and Saxon people existed as separate tribes
at all, we may be sure that they possessed battle-songs,
like those common to the whole Aryan stock. But
among the Teutonic races poetry was not distinguished
by either of the peculiarities—rime or
metre—which mark off modern verse from prose,
so far as its external form is concerned. Our
existing English system of versification is not derived
from our old native poetry at all; it is a development
of the Romance system, adopted by the school of Gower
and Chaucer from the French and Italian poets.
Its metre, or syllabic arrangement, is an adaptation
from the Greek quantitative prosody, handed down through
Latin and the neo-Latin dialects; its rime is a Celtic
peculiarity borrowed by the Romance nationalities,
and handed on through them to modern English literature
by the Romance school of the fourteenth century.
Our original English versification, on the other hand,
was neither rimed nor rhythmic. What answered
to metre was a certain irregular swing, produced by
a roughly recurrent number of accents in each couplet,
without restriction as to the number of feet or syllables.
What answered to rime was a regular and marked alliteration,
each couplet having a certain key-letter, with which
three principal words in the couplet began. In
addition to these two poetical devices, Anglo-Saxon
verse shows traces of parallelism, similar to that
which distinguishes Hebrew poetry. But the alliteration
and parallelism do not run quite side by side, the
second half of each alliterative couplet being parallel
with the first half of the next couplet. Accordingly,
each new sentence begins somewhat clumsily in the middle
of the couplet. All these peculiarities are not,
however, always to be distinguished in every separate
poem.
