When the Vikings Interrupted England’s Peace
The Dark Ages were a violent era in Anglo-Saxon England. In 655 Penda, a warlike king of Merica, one of several rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England, breathed his last. Everybody breathed a collective sigh of relief, because Penda’s era of widespread warfare was followed by one of relative peace. It came to be seen as an Anglo-Saxon golden age. It was a period of economic expansion, which produced a surplus that helped fund a growing number of monasteries – centers of learning in the early Middle Ages. In 669, the Archbishop of Canterbury founded a school in his city – the first school in England. The Venerable Bede described it about 60 years later as having “attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome knowledge“.
Some of them, who survived into Bede’s own day, were as fluent in Greek and Latin as they were in their native English. Other academic institutions produced scholars and poets who wrote in Latin. One of them, Aldhelm, pioneered a grandiloquent style that became the dominant Latin style for centuries to come. Anglo-Saxon scholars were the most highly respected throughout Europe in this period. Bede himself was one of the foremost scholars and men of letters in Christendom. Unfortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, as seen below, the Vikings were about to wreck their golden age.
