Germanic and Roman antiquity and the sense of the past in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

Nothing is more characteristic of the Dark Ages than the ease with which the barbarians assimilated Latin culture. Within a century of Augustine's mission to the pagan English, ‘a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation’ who ‘paralysed [him] with terror’, Ceolfrith had attempted to make Jarrow a second Vivarium and Northumbria could boast scriptoria with an uncial hand superior to the contemporary products of Rome herself. No less striking is the career of a barbarian prince like Cædwalla, who emerged from the forests of Wessex on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was baptized in St Peter's and had his epitaph written in classical metres by the archbishop of Milan. Yet the Christianity which thus introduced the Saxons to Mediterranean classicism did not cut them off from their native cultural inheritance. The Northumbria which produced the Codex Amiatinus was also the home of Cædmon and of the Lindisfarne Gospels, whose rich mixture of Roman and barbaric elements exemplifies the Saxons’ success in turning vernacular poetry and insular art to Christian themes.