were dangerous; and posts were not established. Events were only
known by rumour, from pilgrims, or by letters carried In couriers to
the parties interested: the public did not enjoy even those fallible
vehicles of intelligence, newspapers. In this situation did monks,
at twenty, fifty, an hundred, nay, a thousand miles distance (and
under the circumstances I have mentioned even twenty miles were
considerable) undertake to write history--and they wrote it
accordingly.

If we take a survey of our own history, and examine it with any
attention, what an unsatisfactory picture does it present to
us! How dry, how superficial, how void of information! How
little is recorded besides battles, plagues, and religious
foundations! That this should be the case, before the Conquest, is
not surprizing. Our empire was but forming itself, or re-collecting
its divided members into one mass, which, from the desertion of the
Romans, had split into petty kingdoms. The invasions of nations as
barbarous as ourselves, interfered with every plan of policy and
order that might have been formed to settle the emerging state; and
swarms of foreign monks were turned loose upon us with their new
faith and mysteries, to bewilder and confound the plain good sense
of our ancestors. It was too much to have Danes, Saxons, and Popes,
to combat at once! Our language suffered as much as our government;
and not having acquired much from our Roman masters, was miserably
disfigured by the subsequent invaders. The unconquered parts of the
island retained some purity and some precision. The Welsh and Erse
tongues wanted not harmony: but never did exist a more barbarous
jargon than the dialect, still venerated by antiquaries, and called
Saxon. It was so uncouth, so inflexible to all composition, that the
monks, retaining the idiom, were reduced to write in what they took