This was certainly the caſe in England among our Saxon forefathers; and it becomes a matter of intereſt to aſcertain what were really the types which belonged to the Saxon race, and to diſtinguiſh them from thoſe which they derived from the Roman inhabitants of our iſland.
We have only one record of the manners of the Saxons before they ſettled 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 compoſed before the people who ſpoke that language had quitted their ſettlements on the Continent. Yet we can hardly peruſe it without ſuſpecting that ſome of its portraitures are deſcriptive rather of what was ſeen in England than of what exiſted in the north of Germany. Thus we might almoſt imagine that the “ſtreet variegated with ſtones” (ſtræt wæs ſtán-ſáh), along which the hero Beowulf and his followers proceeded from the ſhore to the royal reſidence 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 cauſe to be built a houſe, “a great mead-hall,” which was to be his chief palace, or metropolis. The hall-gate, we are informed, roſe aloft, “high and curved with pinnacles” (heáh and horn-geáp). It is elſewhere deſcribed as a “lofty houſe;” the hall was high; it was “faſt within and without, with iron bonds, forged cunningly;” it appears that there were ſteps to it, and the roof is deſcribed as being variegated with gold; the walls were covered with tapeſtry (web æfter wagum), which alſo was “variegated with gold,” and preſented to the view “many a wondrous ſight to every one that looketh upon ſuch.” The walls appear to have been of wood; we are repeatedly told that the roof was carved and lofty; the floor is deſcribed as being variegated (probably a teſſelated pavement); and the feats were benches arranged round it, with the exception of Hrothgar’s chair or throne. In the vicinity of the hall ſtood the chambers or bowers, in which there were beds (bed æfter búrum).
Theſe few epithets and alluſions, ſcattered through the poem, give us a tolerable notion of what the houſe of a Saxon chieftain muſt have been in the country from whence our anceſtors came, as well as afterwards in
