Book 1.—BEFORE THE CONQUEST
Chapter 3.—Chapter III.—The Anglo-Saxon Period.
Section 13.—November.
This was the Wint-monat, the wind-month, of the Anglo-Saxons. Its emblems were the blazing hearth and the swine-killing (Fig. 273). The great slaughter-time was come,—the days of fresh meat were passing away. The beeves, and the sheep, and the hogs, whose store of green feed was now exhausted, were doomed to the salting-tubs. The Martinmas beef,—the beef salted at the feast of St. Martin—is still known in the northern parts of the island; and the proverb which we adopted from Spain, “His Martinmas will come, as it does to every hog,” speaks of a destiny as inevitable as the fate of the acorn-fed swine at the salting season.
Mr. Strutt, in his explanation of the illumination of the Saxon Calendar, says, “This month returns us again to the labourers, who are here heating and preparing their utensils.” He then refers us to another drawing of a blacksmith. The Saxon illumination is very rude. In the centre of the composition there is a blazing fire upon the floor; a group on the right are warming their hands; whilst one man on the left is bearing a bundle of fuel, and another doing something at the fire with a rough pair of tongs. We believe that our artist has translated the illumination correctly, in considering this the fire of the domestic hearth, which the labourers are supplying with fresh billets. But as the subject is interpreted by Mr. Strutt, it refers to the craft of the smith, the most important occupation of early times; and we may therefore not improperly say a few words upon this great handicraftsman, who has transmitted us so many inheritors of his name even in our own day. Verstegan says, “Touching such as have their surnames of occupations, as Smith, Taylor, Turner, and such others, it is not to be doubted but their ancestors have first gotten them by using such trades; and the children of such parents being content to take them upon them, their after-coming posterity could hardly avoid them, and so in time cometh it rightly to be said,—
‘From whence came Smith, all be he knight or squire,
But from the smith that forgeth at the fire.’ ’
But the author of an ingenious little book, lately published, on
“English Surnames,” Mr. Lower, points out that the term was
originally applied to all smiters in general. The Anglo-Saxon
Smith was the name of any one that struck with a hammer,—a
carpenter, as well as a worker in iron. They had specific names for
the ironsmith, the goldsmith, the coppersmith; and the numerous
race of the Smiths are the representatives of the great body
of artificers amongst our Saxon ancestors. The ironsmith is
represented labouring at his forge in Fig. 294, and in Fig. 295,
where, in another compartment of the drawing, we have the figure
of a harper. The monks themselves were smiths; and St. Dunstan,
the ablest man of his age, was a worker in iron. The ironsmith
could produce any tool by his art, from a ploughshare to a needle.
The smith in Alfric’s Colloquy says, “Whence the share to the
ploughman, or the goad, but for my art? Whence to the fisherman
an angle, or to the shoewright an awl, or to the sempstress a needle,
but for my art?” No wonder then that the art was honoured and
cultivated. The antiquaries have raised a question whether the
Anglo-Saxon horses were shod; and they appear to have decided
in the negative, because the great districts for the breed of horses
were fenny districts, where the horses might travel without shoes
(See ‘Archæologia,’ vol. iii.). The crotchets of the learned are
certainly unfathomable. Mr. Pegge, the writer to whom we
allude, says, “Here in England one has reason to think they began
to shoe soon after the Norman Conquest. William the Conqueror
gave to Simon St. Liz, a noble Norman, the town of Northampton,
and the whole hundred of Falkley, then valued at forty pound per
annum, to provide shoes for his horses.” If the shoes were not
wanted, by reason of the nature of the soil in Anglo-Saxon times,
the invading Normans might have equally dispensed with them,
and William might have saved his manor for some better suit and
service. Montfaucon tells us, that when the tomb of Childeric, the
father of Clovis, who was buried with his horse in the fifth century,
was opened in 1653, an iron horseshoe was found within it. If
the horse of Childeric wore iron horseshoes, we may reasonably
conclude that the horses of Alfred and Athelstane, of Edgar and
Harold, were equally provided by their native smiths. There is
little doubt that the mines of England were well worked in the
Saxon times. “Iron-ore was obtained in several counties, and there
were furnaces for smelting. The mines of Gloucestershire in
particular are alluded to by Giraldus Cambrensis as producing an
abundance of this valuable metal; and there is every reason for
supposing that these mines were wrought by the Saxons, as indeed
they had most probably been by their predecessors the Romans.
Figure spread at pages 72 and 73:
