Alfred died after having reigned for nearly thirty years.  Much that he had done seemed to die with him, for once again the Danes descended upon our coasts.  Once again they conquered, and Canute the Dane became King of England.  But the English spirit was strong, and the Danish invasion has left scarcely a trace upon our language.  Nor did the Danish power last long, for in 1042 we had in Edward the Confessor an English king once more.  But he was English only in name.  In truth he was more than half French, and under him French forces began already to work on our literature.  A few years later that French force became overwhelming, for in 1066 William of Normandy came to our shores, and with his coming it seemed for a time as if the life of English literature was to be crushed out forever.  Only by the Chronicle were both prose and poetry kept alive in the English tongue.  And it is to Alfred the Great that we owe this slender thread which binds our English literature of to-day with the literature of a thousand years ago.

Chapter XVI WHEN ENGLISH SLEPT

“William came o’er the sea,
With bloody sword came he. 
Cold heart and bloody sword hand
Now rule the English land.” 

                The Heimskringla

WILLIAM THE NORMAN ruled England.  Norman knights and nobles filled all the posts of honor at court, all the great places in the land.  Norman bishops and abbots ruled in church and monastery.  The Norman tongue was alone the speech in court and hall, Latin alone was the speech of the learned.  Only among the lowly, the unlearned, and the poor was English heard.

It seemed as if the English tongue was doomed to vanish before the conquering Norman, even as the ancient British tongue had vanished before the conquering English.  And, in truth, for two hundred years it might have been thought that English prose was dead, “put to sleep by the sword.”  But it was not so.  It slept, indeed, but to awake again.  For England conquered the conqueror.  And when English Literature awoke once more, it was the richer through the gifts which the Norman had brought.

One thing the Normans had brought was a liking for history, and soon there sprang up a whole race of chroniclers.  They, like Bede, were monks and priests.  They lived in monasteries, and wrote in Latin.  One after another they wrote, and when one laid down his pen, another took it up.  Some of these chroniclers were mere painstaking men who noted facts and dates with care.  But others were true writers of literature, who told their tales in vivid, stirring words, so that they make these times live again for us.  The names of some of the best of these chroniclers are Eadmer, Orderic Vitalis, and William of Malmesbury.

By degrees these Norman and Anglo-Norman monks became filled with the spirit of England.  They wrote of England as of their home, they were proud to call themselves English, and they began to desire that England should stand high among the nations.  It is, you remember, from one of these chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmout (see chapter vi.), that we date the reawakening of story-telling in England.