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Updated: May 25, 2025
"Thus Caedmon, keeping in mind all he heard, and, as it were, chewing the cud, converted the same into most harmonious verse; and sweetly repeating the same, made his masters in their turn his hearers.
They say that Caedmon was a cow-keeper: but the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and Wordsworth himself, in his boldest flights of theory, was forced to allow of selection.
I use the word "Caedmonic" to cover the poetry which used to be attributed to Caedmon, and which was probably written under his influence. I cannot give the poem at full length, but in parts quote from it, and in part give the gist of it. It begins with a description of the Happy Land which is the home of the Phoenix. Far away in the East it lies, that noblest of lands, renowned among men.
It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth and ninth centuries.
The type of the Anglo-Saxon poets in Christian times is Caedmon, whom Professor George Stephens called "the Milton of North England in the seventh century," and who, according to the legend told by Bede, being singularly unblessed with the power of song, received the gift miraculously in sleep.
We see that Hilda must have been a most remarkable woman for her times, instilling into those around her a passion for learning as well as right-living, for despite the fact that they worked and prayed in rude wooden buildings, with walls formed, most probably, of split tree-trunks, after the fashion of the church at Greenstead in Essex, we find the institution producing, among others, such men as Bosa and John, both Archbishops of York, and such a poet as Caedmon.
At first he was so bewildered that he could not answer. Then he heard the voice again. "Caedmon, sing something." "Oh, I cannot sing," answered the poor man." I do not know any song; and my voice is harsh and unpleasant. It was for this reason that I left my fellows in the abbey kitchen and came here to be alone." "But you must sing," said the voice. "You must sing."
None of these, however, have a greater claim to be remembered than the cow-herd Caedmon, the first English poet, and the story as given by Bede is perhaps one of the most charming in his Ecclesiastical History. Apart from the literary interest attaching to the story, his life shows some of the details in outward organisation of these great double monasteries.
We possess poems on the subjects which St Bede tells us that Caedmon wrote upon, but we cannot be sure that any of these are actually that poet's work. St Bede tells us that many others after him wrote noble songs, but he sets Caedmon's work above that of all those others as having been the product of a gift direct from God. In any case he must have influenced those who wrote later than he.
The doctrine and sentiments are strictly Catholic, but the poem is at the same time an epitome of what St. Cuthbert and the monks of Lindisfarne, the royal Abbess Hilda, Caedmon, and now it appears Cynewulf also had been long doing for Northumbria, in taking what was grand and heroic in the old heathen traditions, and leading up through them to Christianity.
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