550.
xii Psalm xxi. 3.
xiii "All were indignant at the shameless deed, and
murmured amongst themselves,"--William of Malmesbury.
xiv The Welsh were driven from Exeter by King
Athelstane; before that time, Englishmen and Welsh had inhabited it with
equal rights.
xv The earliest inhabitants of Ireland were called Scots.
xvi Legends about St. Dunstan.
"It is a great pity," says Mr. Freeman, in his valuable "Old English
History," "that so many strange stories are told about him [Dunstan],
because people are apt to think of those stories and not of his real
actions." This has indeed been the case to such an extent that his
talents, as a statesman and as an ecclesiastical legislator, are almost
unknown to many who are very familiar with the story of his seizing the
devil by the nose with a pair of tongs. Sir Francis Palgrave supposes
that St. Dunstan's seclusion at the time had led him to believe, like so
many solitaries, that he was attacked in person by the fiend, and that
he related his visions, which were accepted as absolute facts by his
credulous hearers. Hence the author has assumed the currency of some of
these marvellous legends in his tale, and has introduced a later one
into the text of the present chapter. But the whole life of the saint,
as related by his monkish biographers, is literally full of such
legends, some terrible, some ludicrous. One of the most remarkable
deserves mention, bearing, as it does, upon our tale.
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