verse of an agriculturist; it looks with disfavour upon mountains and
rugged scenes, while its ideal is one of peaceful tillage. The monk
speaks out in it as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly different
from that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other fierce war-songs.
Moreover, it contains one or two rimes, preserved in this translation,
whose full significance will be pointed out hereafter.

The anarchy of Northumbria, and still more the Danish inroads, put an
end to the literary movement in the North and the Midlands; but the
struggle in Wessex gave new life to the West Saxon people. Under Ælfred,
Winchester became the centre of English thought. But the West Saxon
literature is almost entirely written in English, not in Latin; a fact
which marks the progressive development of vocabulary and idiom in the
native tongue. Ælfred himself did much to encourage literature, inviting
over learned men from the continent, and founding schools for the West
Saxon youth in his dwarfed dominions. Most of the Winchester works are
attributed to his own pen, though doubtless he was largely aided by his
advisers, and amongst others by Asser, his Welsh secretary and Bishop of
Sherborne. They comprise translations into the Anglo-Saxon of Boëthius
_de Consolatione_, the Universal History of Orosius, Bæda's
Ecclesiastical History, and Pope Gregory's _Regula Pastoralis_. But the
fact that Ælfred still has recourse to Roman originals, marks the stage
of civilisation as yet mainly imitative; while the interesting passages
intercalated by the king himself show that the beginnings of a really
native prose literature were already taking shape in English hands.

The chief monument of this truly Anglo-Saxon literature, begun and
completed by English writers in the English tongue alone, is the
Chronicle. That invaluable document, the oldest history of any Teutonic
race in its own language, was probably first compiled at the court of