Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/48

 the earliest British, writer, was of the ancient British, not of the Anglo-Saxon people, and wrote about the year 560, or a century after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England. Gildas Albanius, or Saint Gildas, preceded him by about a century; and both wrote in Latin, not in the British or the Saxon tongue. The "Historia Ecclesiastica Venerabilis Bedæ" was written in Latin about the year 731; and King Alfred translated this work of the Venerable Bede into Anglo-Saxon about 858, or by other account some time between 872 and 900. Asser wrote "De Vita et Rebus Gestis Alfredi" about the same period, for he died 910. Nennius, and his annotator Samuel, are placed by Pinkerton about the year 858. Florence of Worcester wrote about 1100; Simeon of Durham about 1164; Giraldus Cambrensis hi the same century. The "Saxon Chronicle" appears to have been the work of different hands from the 11th to the 12th century. Roger of Hovedon wrote about 1210; Matthew Paris, the contemporary of Snorro Sturleson, about 1240. These are the principal writers among the Anglo-Saxons referred to by our historians, down to the age of Snorro Sturleson; and they all wrote in Latin, not in the language of the people—the Anglo-Saxon.

This separation of the mind and language, and of the intellectual influence of the upper educated classes, from the uneducated mass of the Anglo-Saxon people, on the Continent as well as in England, by the barrier of a dead language, forms the great distinctive difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the Northmen; and to it may be traced much of the difference in the social condition, spirit, and character of the two branches of the Teutonic or Saxon race at the present day. It is but about a century ago, about 1740, that this barrier was broken down in Germany, and men of genius or science began to write for the German