Free Albion by Peter Ackroyd Page A

lamentation. The works of Bede and Gildas may not be “true” histories, any more than Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Ro
man Empire and Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution are “true” histories, but the power of their writing commanded assent for many years.
    Gildas was a Briton whose sixth-century
De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
(a history of England from the Roman conquest to his own time, with a lament on the evils of his day) was composed in Latin for a European audience, but it has its touches of native poetry. England is an island “stiff with icy cold,” whose faithlessness may cause it to be “totally enveloped in thick darkness of black night.” The nation, invaded by Picts and Scots, lies like a fallen warrior “stunned and groaning” in the very mouths of enemies who resemble “wolves rabid with deepest hunger.” The defeated Britons flee “to mountainous regions, overhanging hills, fortified crags, and to most dense forests and marine rocks.” 3 As in Saxon poetry, the landscape is always bleak. Gildas employs a deliberately plangent and embellished style, with exclamations and rhetorical questions, designed as much to edify and admonish as to inform. He was not above invention either, since he saw no point in spoiling a good story or ruining an interesting moral. But he was so powerful a writer that many of his more notable misrepresentations were accepted until recent times. It was Gildas who promulgated the myth that the Romans and the British Celts were thoroughly at odds with each other, distinct and separate races, whereas the archaeological evidence suggests prolonged intermingling. And yet Gildas’s spiritual fervour was so great that he was revered as a saint and prophet as well as an historian, while at the same time he created an historical myth or model which survived for five hundred years.
    Certainly it was maintained by the ninth-century historian Nennius, who borrowed from both Bede and Gildas, thus continuing the tradition of religio-historical writing which dominated English historiography at least until the publication in 1670 of Milton’s
History of England
.
    Nennius collected “The Matter of Britain” from many sources, but not the least of his virtues lies in his account of King Arthur. The Arthurian legends came to dominate the concept of Englishness, but Nennius obtains the prize as the first “historian” to describe this notorious if ultimately elusive king. He also lists a number of “marvels” to be seen in England—among them a hot pool in Bath which changes its temperature according to the wishes of the bather, and wells of salt near Droitwich. The love of the marvellous may again be a national trait.
    The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, which recorded events in England from the beginning of the Christian era to 1154, is filled with wonders—the sign of the cross is seen upon the face of the moon, dragons fly through the air, fiery flashes light up the landscape—while its unadorned transcript of events is interlaced with cadences and images that might have been taken out of contemporaneous epic poetry. Its narrative of the Mercian or Northumbrian poet Cynewulf and his rivalry with Cyneheard, dated 757, “has often been called the first story in English” and is closely related “to a completely lost oral-prose tradition” in the manner of “Icelandic saga,” 4 which suggests that the island was once full of sounds and sweet airs. The first story in English may have seemed like a song.

CHAPTER 7
    The Lives of Others

    If Bede fashioned
a history for England, he also populated it with characters; as well as an historian he was a biographer who helped to create a form that has exercised a peculiar fascination over the English imagination ever since. There had been earlier “lives of the saints.” There were lives of Cuthbert and of Columba, of Wilfrid and of Guthlac, all of them related to the same essential hagiographic