On Some Ancient Battle-Fields In Lancashire Part 2

If this be true, how has history fared at the hands of such craftsmen as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Archdeacon Walter Map, Sir Thos. Malory, and a whole host of mediaeval romance writers, with their King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, their magicians, sorcerers, giants, dragons, and other monsters? History, in its highest, indeed its only legitimate, sense, most unquestionably has suffered to a much greater extent than can be conceived, except by those who have patiently plodded amongst the details of a portion at least of its dim and dusty, and oft-times doubtful, raw material. But, on the other hand, to the novelist or the poet _historical_ truthfulness in the incidents of which his plot is composed, or _biographical_ truthfulness in the characters delineated, is simply surplusage, if it be nothing worse, _aesthetic_ or artistic verities having no necessary foundation thereupon. It is this aesthetic ideal, evolved from _general_ rather than _individual_ truths, this poetic element, which lies at the root, and, indeed, furnishes the _raison d'etre_, the very life-giving blood, of such art products as those under consideration. Hamlet, Lear, Imogen, Ophelia, Cordelia, Oberon, Elaine, Sir Galahad, Achilleus, Arthur, _et hoc genus omne_, possess an inherent subjective vitality and truthfulness of their own, drawn from the universal and everlasting fountains of human emotion, pa.s.sion, and psychical aspiration, however little realistic, individual, or strictly historic value the learned may place on the legends of Saxo Grammaticus and Geoffrey of Monmouth, or the myths of our common Aryan ancestors. Thos. Carlyle, in "Sartor Resartus," aptly asks--"Was Luther's picture of the devil _less a reality_, whether it were formed within the bodily eye, or without it?" Dean Milman, in his essay on "Pagan and Christian Sepulchres," referring to the "two large mounds popularly known as the tombs of the Horatii and the Curiatii," on the Appian way, near Rome, says--"Let us leave the legend undisturbed, and take no more notice of those wicked disenchanters of our old belief."

Yet he feelingly and truthfully adds--"They will leave us at least the poetry, if they scatter our history into a mist." Truly the aesthetic element, if in itself worthy, will ever survive the destruction of the presumed historical verity with which it may have been for ages allied.

Who now believes in the historic truthfulness of the reputed deeds of the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of ancient Greece and Rome? And yet the aesthetic beauties of Homer, aeschylus, Virgil, and Ovid are none the less admired and enjoyed. Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in his Life of J. M. W.

Turner, when commenting on the lack of "topographical," and other realistic truthfulness, both in colour and details, in many of the great landscape painter's finest productions, thus aptly deals with the difference between aesthetic and literal truthfulness--"It is with these drawings as with the romances of Sir Walter Scott: a time comes in the life of every intelligent reader when he perceives that Scott was not, and could not be, really true to the times he represented, except when they approached very near his own; but a student of literature would be much to be pitied who was unable to enjoy 'Ivanhoe' after this discovery. So when we have found out the excessive freedom which Turner allowed himself; when we have discovered that he is not to be trusted for the representation of any object, however important--that his chiaroscuro, though effective is arbitrary, and his colour though brilliant is false; when we have quite satisfied ourselves, in a word, that he is a poet, and not an architectural draughtsman, or an imitator of nature, is that a reason why we should not enjoy the poems? There is a wide difference, I grant, between the pleasure of real belief and the pleasure of confessed imagination: the first belongs to imaginative ignorance, and is only possible for the uncritical; the second belongs to a state of knowledge, and is only possible for those in whom the acquisition of knowledge has not deadened the imaginative faculties.

Show the 'Rivers of France' to a boy who has the natural faculties which perceive beauty, but who is still innocent of criticism, he will believe the drawings to be true, and think as he dreams over them that a day may come when he will visit these enchanting scenes. Show them to a real critic, and he will not accept for fact a single statement made by the draughtsman from beginning to end, but he will say--'The poetic power is here,' and then he will yield to its influence, and dream also in his own way--not like the boy, in simple faith, but in the pleasant make-belief faith which is all that the poet asks of us."

This aesthetic truthfulness, in contradistinction to literal historic fact, is admirably expressed by Macaulay in an entry in his journal, in August, 1851. He says--"I walked far into Herefords.h.i.+re," (from Malvern) "and read, while walking, the last five books of the 'Iliad,' with deep interest and many tears. I was afraid to be seen crying by the parties of walkers that met me as I came back; crying for Achilles cutting off his hair; crying for Priam rolling on the ground in the court-yard of his house; mere imaginary beings, creatures of an old ballad maker who died near three thousand years ago."

Lord Byron wrote under the influence of the traditions of his youth or of his cla.s.sical college education, and not as the true poet, when he said--"I stood upon the plain of Troy daily for more than a month, in 1810; and if anything diminished my pleasure it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity." On the contrary, I felt no such lack of pleasurable emotion when I first gazed on the Thames at Datchet, or on the withered trunk of "Herne's Oak," or on the Trossachs and Loch Katrine, or on the Rialto or the Ducal palace at Venice, or on the Colisseum or the adjacent ruins of the "lone mother of dead empires," because the mere _historical_ verity of Jack Falstaff's unwieldly carcase, or of Shakspere, Otway, Byron or Scott's ideal and semi-historical personages, never once entered into my mind. It was sufficient for me that the scenes before me were those which were contemplated and portrayed by the great dramatists and the great novelist and the great poet. For the time being, thanks to the law of mental a.s.sociation, to my imagination their characters were as real personages as was necessary for the fullest appreciation and enjoyment of the ideal of their artistic creators, and anything more, _being unnecessary_, might have been intrusive, or even _impertinent_, in the original and non-metaphorical meaning of that somewhat abused word.

Byron spoke more to the purpose in the opening stanzas of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," when, after lamenting the fate of Venice, and recalling the glories of her past history, he exclaims:--

But unto us she hath a spell beyond Her name in story and her long array Of mighty shadows whose dim forms despond Above the dogeless city's vanish'd sway; Ours is a trophy which will not decay With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor And Pierre can not be swept and worn away-- The keystones of the arch! Though all were o'er, For us repeopled were the solitary sh.o.r.e.

He adds, with more significant meaning:--

The beings of the mind are not of clay; Essentially immortal, they create And multiply in us a brighter ray And more beloved existence.

Dr. Gervinus says--"Shakspere's representations of the pa.s.sionate, the prodigal, the hypocrite, are not portraits of this or that individual, but _examples of those pa.s.sions elevated out of particular into general truth_, of which, in real life, we may find a thousand diminished copies, but never the original in the exact proportions given by the poet." And so it is with the aesthetic truth embodied in artistic creations of a plastic or pictorial character. No one acquainted with art products of its cla.s.s imagines that the colossal statue recently erected in Germany to the memory of Hermann, or Arminius, the conqueror of the Roman legions under Varus (A.D. 9), is an absolute every-day portrait-likeness of that not very morally scrupulous "hero and patriot;" or that the faces, figures, costumes, and other accessories, in the "Last Supper" of Da Vinci, or the "Cartoons" of Raffaelle, represent, _historically_ or _de facto_, the scenes as they actually occurred. Though conventionally called "historical pictures," they are emphatically creations of the imaginations of the artists, notwithstanding their historic basis, and consequently the great truths that pervade them, and for which they are justly admired, are of an artistic or aesthetic, and not of a strictly historic, character.

Notwithstanding this general lack of historic truthfulness we, nevertheless, do gain valuable knowledge of a psychological, ethnological, and even of a strictly historical character from stories of the mythical and legendary cla.s.s; but much of that knowledge pertains to the age and its mental a.s.sociations in which the story-tellers or other artistic exponents themselves lived. In the Arthurian romances we find an immense amount of historic truthfulness with reference to the habits of thought, costume, and religious sentiment, which obtained in and about the twelfth century; but which truths are utterly untrue, as applied by the writers, to the fifth and sixth, the era in which Arthur and his Christian knights, magicians, and giants are presumed to have been corporal existences. The same may be said of much of Bede's, and, indeed, of most other early chronicles. Although we may refuse our a.s.sent to the improbable and miraculous stories therein narrated, we feel convinced, in Bede's instance especially, that the writer is thoroughly in earnest, and honest in his work, and that he, at least, correctly describes the manners, customs, faiths, superst.i.tions, and legendary history prevalent at the period in which he lived. This view is now the one generally accepted by the best historians and ethnological and psychological students. Mr. Ralph N. Wornum, in his "Epochs of Painting Characterised," says--"Ancient opinions are of themselves facts, and the history of any subject is indeed imperfect when the ideas of early ages regarding it are altogether overlooked, for the impressions and a.s.sociations made or suggested by any intellectual pursuit are, as one of its effects, a part of the subject itself." Mr.

Tylor, in the work already quoted, says--"The very myths that were discarded as lying fables prove to be sources of history in ways that their makers and transmitters little dreamed of. Their meaning has been misunderstood, but they have a meaning. Every tale that was ever told has a meaning for the times it belongs to. Even a lie, as the Spanish proverb says, is a lady of birth. ('_La mentira es hija de algo._') Thus, as evidence of the development of thought as records of long pa.s.sed belief and usage, even in some measure as materials for the history of the nations owning them, the old myths have fairly taken their place among historic facts; and with such the modern historian, so able and so willing to pull down, is also able and willing to rebuild."

M. Mallet, in his "Northern Antiquities," referring to the semi-historical romances of the Scandinavians, says--"It is needless to observe that great light may be thrown on the character and sentiments of a nation, by those very books, whence we can learn nothing exact or connected of their history. The most credulous writer, he that has the greatest pa.s.sion for the marvellous, while he falsifies the history of his contemporaries, paints their manners of life and modes of thinking without perceiving it. His simplicity, his ignorance, are at once pledges of the artless truth of his drawing, and a warning to distrust that of his relations."

Dr. A. d.i.c.kson White, in his treatise on "The Warfare of Science,"

forcibly ill.u.s.trates the absolute necessary harmony of all truth, subjective and objective, although we may not always possess sufficient insight to perceive it. He says--"G.o.d's truths must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul, or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day, in its full play of emotions or pa.s.sions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life ebbed forth millions of years ago."

Professor Gervinus, in his "Shakespeare Commentaries," has skilfully a.n.a.lysed the distinction between historic and aesthetic truth. He says--"Where the historian, bound by an oath to the severest truth in every single statement, can, at the most, only permit us to divine the causes of events and the motives of actions from the bare narration of facts, the poet, who seeks to draw from these facts only a _general moral truth, and not one of facts_, unites by poetic fiction the action and actors in a distinct living relation of cause and effect. The more freely and boldly he does this, as Shakespeare has done in 'Richard III.,' the more poetically interesting will his treatment of the history become, but the more will it lose its historical value; the more truly and closely he adheres to reality, as in 'Richard II.,' the more will his poetry gain in historic meaning and forfeit in poetic splendour."

Shakspere so thoroughly felt and understood this, that in the construction of his plot, and even in the determination of the specialities of the characters of Macbeth and his indomitable wife, he has selected his incidents from more than one epoch in early Scottish history. The famous murder scenes in the first and second acts, so far as they are "historically" true, are drawn from the a.s.sa.s.sination of a previous king, Duffe, in 971 or 972, by Donwald, captain of the castle of Fores, whose wife is the "historic" original of the "aesthetic" Lady Macbeth of the tragedy, and not the spouse (if he had one) of the chieftain who, history simply says, "slew the king [Duncan] at Inverness," in an ordinary battle in 1040.

Professor Gervinus adds--"It is a common pride on the part of the poets of these historical plays, and a natural peculiarity belonging to this branch of the art, that truth and poetry should go hand in hand. It is more than probable that 'Henry VIII.' bore at first the t.i.tle so characteristic in this respect--'All is True.' But this truth is throughout, as we have seen, not to be taken in the prosaic sense of the historian, who seeks it in the historical material in every most minute particular, and in its most different aspects; it is only a higher and universal truth which is gathered by a poet from a series of historical facts, yet which from the very circ.u.mstance that it springs from historical, true and actual facts, and is supported and held by them, acquires, it must be admitted, a double authority, that of poetry and history combined. The historical drama, formed of these two component parts, is therefore especially agreeable to the imaginative friend of history and the realistic friend of poetry."

It will thus be seen that there is no necessary antagonism between individual, or historic, and ideal, or aesthetic, truth. Their respective lines of action may be divergent, but they are, when thoroughly understood, both in harmony with the great central and "eternal verity"

which embodies all truth. The only danger to be guarded against by the historic or aesthetic student arises from the too common habit of confounding the one with the other.

Tennyson, in his "Queen Mary," says--

The very Truth and very Word are one, But truth of story, which I glanced at, girl, Is like a word that comes from olden days, And pa.s.ses thro' the peoples: every tongue Alters it pa.s.sing, till it spells and speaks Quite other than at first.

Nennius speaks of a tenth battle fought and won by Arthur on the banks of the river Trat Treuroit, or Ribroit. This has been identified by commentators as the Brue, in Somersets.h.i.+re, and the Ribble, in Lancas.h.i.+re; but the evidence advanced is not very conclusive in favour of either locality. Mr. Haigh prefers Trefdraeth, in the island of Anglesea, as the place indicated.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER II.

THE DEFEAT AND DEATH OF ST. OSWALD, OF NORTHUMBRIA, AT MASERFELD,

(A.D. 642).

THE LEGEND OF THE WILD BOAR, "THE MONSTER IN FORMER AGES, WHICH PROWLED OVER THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF WINWICK, INFLICTING INJURY ON MAN AND BEAST."

The Venerable Bede, in the ninth chapter of his "Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation," says, in the year 642--"Oswald was killed in a great battle, by the same Pagan nation and Pagan king of the Mercians who had slain his predecessor, Edwin, at a place called in the English tongue, Maserfelth, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, on the fifth day of the month of August."

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the same date, says--"This year Oswald, King of the Northumbrians, was slain by Penda and the South-humbrians at Maserfeld, on the nones of August, and his body was buried at Bardney (Lincolns.h.i.+re). His sanct.i.ty and miracles were afterwards manifested in various ways beyond this island, and his hands are at Bamborough"

(Northumberland), "uncorrupted."

The battle is likewise recorded by relatively more recent chroniclers, yet its site, hitherto, has not been satisfactorily determined. Camden, Capgrave, Pennant, Sharon Turner, and some others fix it at Oswestry, in Shrops.h.i.+re; while Archbishop Usher, Alban Butler, Powell, Dr. Cowper, Edward Baines, Thomas Baines, W. Beaumont, Dr. Kendrick, Mr. T. Littler, and others prefer the neighbourhood of Winwick, in the "Fee of Makerfield," Lancas.h.i.+re.[11]

Mr. Edward Baines says--"The district in which Winwick is seated has, from a very distant period, been denominated Mackerfield or Macerfield--a battle-field, with variations in the orthography usually found in Norman and Anglo-Saxon writers." The late Rev. Edmund Simpson, vicar of Ashton-in-Mackerfield, however, disputes this etymology, and contends that "Mackerfield is Mag-er-feld, a great plain cultivated: _mag_ and _er_ being Gaelic and _feld_ Saxon. Thus Maghull, near Liverpool, is a hill on the plain: thus, also, Maghera-felt in Ireland."

The "Fee of Makerfield" was co-extensive with the Newton hundred of the Domesday record, and included nineteen towns.h.i.+ps. It extended from Wigan to Winwick, and was traversed in its entire length by the great Roman road, which entered Northumbria from the south near Warrington.

Professor Dwight Whitney, in his "Life and Growth of Language" (p. 39), says--"_aecer_ meant in Anglo-Saxon a 'cultivated field,' as does the German acker to the present day; and here, again, we have its very ancient correlatives in Sanscrit _agra_, Greek ?????, Latin _ager_; the restriction of the word to signify a field of certain fixed dimensions, taken as a unit of measure for fields in general, is something quite peculiar and recent. It is a.n.a.lagous with the like treatment of _rod_ and _foot_ and _grain_, and so on, except that in these cases we have saved the old meaning while adding the new."

Field is from A.S., O.S., and Ger. _feld_, Danish _veld_, the open _country_, cleared lawn (Collins's Dic. Der.) With respect to acre the old meaning is still retained, in one instance at least. We still say "G.o.d's acre," when speaking of a churchyard or burial ground.

The following are some of the princ.i.p.al variations in the writing of the name: Bede calls it Maserfelth, King Alfred writes it Maserfeld, as in one MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Another copy, however, has it Maresfeld. The latter is probably a clerical error resultant from the accidental misplacement of the letters _r_ and _s_ by the copyist, or it may be an ordinary example of what philologists call "metathesis," or transliteration. Matthew of Westminster writes it Marelfeld, and John of Brompton, Maxelfeld. Matthew and John, however, are relatively modern authorities in comparison with Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Alfred. Their orthography, however, furnishes an apt ill.u.s.tration of the mutation which has taken place in local nomenclature during the transition of the language from Anglo-Saxon to modern English, and hence the occasional difficulty of satisfactory identification at the present day.

The phonetic difficulty between Maserfeld, Macerfeld, and Makerfield is, perhaps, not insurmountable. The letter _c_ in English is useless, having either the sound of _k_ or _s_. Before _a_, _o_, and _u_, it becomes _k_, as in cat, cot, cure; before _e_ and _i_ it becomes _s_, as in century, certain, cinder, and city. Cer, likewise, by metathesis, or the transposition of the _r_, becomes cre, as in lucre, ma.s.sacre, etc.[12] Thus it would appear the modern word "Makerfield" probably accords both etymologically and topographically with the Anglo-Saxon name of the site of the battle. As no other hamlet, towns.h.i.+p, or parish, or other territorial designation (the nearest being Macclesfield), does this, especially when taken in conjunction with the many corroborative evidences, would appear to satisfactorily identify the locality.[13]

These corroborative evidences are by no means either scanty or unimportant.

The parish church of Winwick is dedicated to St. Oswald, and Mr. Baines says--"Little more than half a mile to the north, on the road to Golborne and Wigan, is an ancient well, which has been known from time immemorial by the name of 'St. Oswald's Well.'" This well is still in existence, and a certain veneration at the present time hovers about it in the minds of others than the superst.i.tious peasantry. On the upper portion of the south wall of the church is an inscription in Latin, purporting to be a "renovation" of a previous one, by a person named Sclater, in the year 1530, in the curacy of Henry Johnson. On a recent visit, this inscription, as well as other portions of the edifice, I found had undergone further renovation. Gough translates the first three lines as follows:--

This place of old did Oswald greatly love: Who the Northumbers ruled, now reigns above, And from Marcelde did to Heaven remove.

Mr. Beamont gives the translation of the inscription as follows:--

This place of yore did Oswald greatly love, Northumbria's King, but now a saint above, Who in Marcelde's field did fighting fall, Hear us, oh blest one, when here to thee we call.

(A line over the porch obliterated.) In fifteen hundred and just three times ten, Sclater restored and built this wall again, And Henry Johnson here was curate then.

This, and its repet.i.tion by Hollingworth in his "Mancuniensis," appears to have alone const.i.tuted "the highest authority" relied upon by Edward Baines for his statement that Winwick parish was the favourite residence of King Oswald. The inscription does not, as some have a.s.sumed, state the church is built in, on, or near Marcelde. It merely a.s.serts that Oswald died at a place so named, and which may have been Winwick, the site of the church dedicated to St. Oswald, or any other locality, Marcelde being evidently a corruption and a rythmical contraction of the undoubted Anglo-Saxon name of the scene of Oswald's defeat and death.

Objection has been taken to the word "Marcelde," as a bad Latin subst.i.tute for "Maserfeld." But the goodness or badness of mediaeval Latin subst.i.tutes for English names is of no consequence to the question at issue, as the reference to the place of Oswald's death is undeniable.

It is but an apt ill.u.s.tration of the strange transformations local nomenclature sometimes has undergone in transmission from past centuries to the present time.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh Bruts curiously confound the incidents attendant upon this and a previous battle, in which Oswald was engaged and was victorious. Geoffrey says that Cadwalla, a Brit-Welsh king, one of the heroes of Lywrich Hen's poetic effusions, _hearing of Oswald's victory over Penda(?)_ at "Heavenfield," "being inflamed with rage, a.s.sembled his army and went in pursuit of the holy king, Oswald; and in a battle which he had with him, at a place called Burne, broke in upon him and killed him."

Geoffrey here, as noted by Sharon Turner, shows his irrational partiality to the fame of the British chieftain, and his disregard of historical truth when it did not minister to his prejudices or presumed patriotism. Cadwalla was slain in the battle with Oswald at "Heavenfield," in 635, seven years previously to the saintly Northumbrian warrior's defeat and death; and, consequently, the British hero was, in accordance with ordinary mortal notions, somewhat incapacitated for the performance of the after-deeds of valour, ascribed to him by his panegyrist--without miraculous intervention--which, however, Geoffrey does not even suggest, notwithstanding its presumed frequency on other momentous occasions.[14]

Referring to Oswald's death, Bede says--"It is also given out and become a proverb, 'that he ended his life in prayer;' for when he was beset with weapons and enemies, he perceived he must immediately be killed, and prayed to G.o.d for the souls of his army, hence it is proverbially said, 'Lord have mercy on their souls, said Oswald, as he fell on the ground.' His bones, therefore, were translated to the monastery which we mentioned (Bardsea), and buried therein; but the king that slew him commanded his head, hands, and arms to be cut off from the body, and set upon stakes. But the successor in the throne, Oswy, coming thither the next year with his army, took them down, and buried his head in the church of Lindisfarne, and the hands and arms in the royal city"

(Bamborough).

Bede relates many anecdotes, ill.u.s.trative of the sanct.i.ty of Oswald, and the miracles wrought by his bones, as well as by the earth which received his blood on the battle-field. One instance I give entire, in Dr. Giles's translation of the venerable historian's own words. In chapter x., book iii., he says--