names of cities were mostly Roman, the names of villages and country
towns were mostly English.




CHAPTER XX.

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