When we think of the prose written in England in early days, we are
thinking of the work of scholars, in a grand language that had done
growing; a language that was to be in Western Christendom the language
of religion, the language of the altar, for how long a time who can
know? the language that gave birth to other languages, as its
literature so powerfully influenced both theirs and that of others not
descended from it. Not yet was the time for a great prose literature in
England, such as grew up many a year ago, and is going on in our own
days.

The earliest literature of a people is almost invariably in verse: the
literature that comes from the heart of a people, and is not the
production of a few learned folk. In early days, there was little
reading or writing, except in the shelter of the great monasteries. The
common folk-literature, which is a very precious thing, is preserved, in
such times as we are thinking of, in people's memories, and circulated
by recitation, this recitation being accompanied by music or by
rhythmical movements of the body. We all know how much easier it is to
remember a page of verse than a page of prose. Thus, the form that could
most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the
first to flourish.

We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's
work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry
with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.

But beside such work as these poems which were written by cultivated
men, many poems and fragments of verse were floating about the land,
come over from the old native country with the first Angles and Saxons