Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/22

 This was certainly the cae in England among our Saxon forefathers; and it becomes a matter of interet to acertain what were really the types which belonged to the Saxon race, and to ditinguih them from thoe which they derived from the Roman inhabitants of our iland.

We have only one record of the manners of the Saxons before they ettled in Britain, and that is neither perfect, nor altogether unaltered—it is the romance of Beowulf, a poem in pure Anglo-Saxon, which contains internal marks of having been compoed before the people who poke that language had quitted their ettlements on the Continent. Yet we can hardly perue it without upecting that ome of its portraitures are decriptive rather of what was een in England than of what exited in the north of Germany. Thus we might almot imagine that the “treet variegated with tones” (træt wæs tán-áh), along which the hero Beowulf and his followers proceeded from the hore to the royal reidence of Hrothgar, was a picture of a Roman road as found in Britain.

It came into the mind of Hrothgar, we are told, that he would caue to be built a houe, “a great mead-hall,” which was to be his chief palace, or metropolis. The hall-gate, we are informed, roe aloft, “high and curved with pinnacles” (heáh and horn-geáp). It is elewhere decribed as a “lofty houe;” the hall was high; it was “fat within and without, with iron bonds, forged cunningly;” it appears that there were teps to it, and the roof is decribed as being variegated with gold; the walls were covered with tapetry (web æfter wagum), which alo was “variegated with gold,” and preented to the view “many a wondrous ight to every one that looketh upon uch.” The walls appear to have been of wood; we are repeatedly told that the roof was carved and lofty; the floor is decribed as being variegated (probably a teelated pavement); and the feats were benches arranged round it, with the exception of Hrothgar’s chair or throne. In the vicinity of the hall tood the chambers or bowers, in which there were beds (bed æfter búrum).

Thee few epithets and alluions, cattered through the poem, give us a tolerable notion of what the houe of a Saxon chieftain mut have been in the country from whence our ancetors came, as well as afterwards in that