The first history in any Germanic language. In the form of annals, it covers the history of England from the invasion of Britain by Julius Cæsar to the accession of Henry II. It was begun about the year 900 (some think by King Alfred), and was continued by numerous writers, usually churchmen. It is monastic in tone, favors church rather than state, but is trustworthy and the foundation of English history. Its language varies from purest Anglo-Saxon to early English.

  Taking the chronicle as a whole, I know not where else to find a series of annals which is so barren of all human interest, and for all purposes of real history so worthless.

  The great mental activity which the Conquest created in England showed itself not only in poetry but in history. Chroniclers sprang up in great numbers. They were chiefly monks, and most of them wrote in Latin. “The Saxon Chronicle” indeed was still carried on in more than one of the monasteries. The annalists, full of despondency, set down many facts, but record with evident satisfaction omens which seemed to betoken evil to the oppressors of their nation. They tell how blood gushed out of the earth in Berkshire near the birth-place of Alfred, and how at Peterborough, then placed under a Norman abbot, horns were heard at dead of night, and spectral huntsmen were seen to ride through the woods. Meanwhile French words so press upon the writer’s brain, and the old snytax becomes so mixed with the grammar of the invading speech, that the chronicler is obliged to cease, and ends his work abruptly in the first year of Henry II.

  In summing up the evidence, we may safely conclude—That the Saxon Codes are only scraps of British or English laws, dishonestly selected and intermixed with errors and lies. That the Saxon charters and other documents are a mass of forgeries. That Saxon literature is represented alone by the Saxon Chronicle and Asser’s “Life of Alfred,” and that these works are shocking impositions; and that, indeed, the Saxons had neither laws nor literature.

  But simple as was his aim, Ælfred created English literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem, that of Cædmon, and a train of ballads and battlesongs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of Ælfred, and above all with the Chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the King’s rendering of Bæda’s history gave the first impulse toward the compilation of what is known as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was certainly thrown into its present form during his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and of the bishops of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were roughly expanded into a national history by insertions from Bæda; but it is when it reaches the reign of Ælfred that the Chronicle suddenly widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that marks the gift of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does from age to age in historic value, it remains the first vernacular history of any Teutonic people, the earliest and the most venerable monument of Teutonic prose. The writer of English history may be pardoned if he lingers too fondly over the figure of the king in whose court, at whose impulse, it may be in whose very words, English history begins.

  The mere language of different manuscripts affords an interesting study to the philologist, the variations of the dialect in different parts bearing witness to different degrees of antiquity in the composition, and the existence of concurrent texts in several places show that it was transcribed and added to by different and independent writers. The existing manuscripts also come to an end at very different dates, and special circumstances contained in particular texts seem occasionally to indicate the monastery in which a particular edition was composed.

  Is a work of superlative value.

  Preserving amid drier annals some exceedingly interesting fragments of composition of the more original kind, both in prose and verse, manifesting an ability to manage the subject which was only much later shown in other vernacular languages, and bridging for us, with a thin but distinct streak of union, the gulf between the decadence or ruin of Anglo-Saxon even before the Conquest and the rise of English proper more than a century subsequent to it.