The singing did not cease when the English came to these islands. The long struggle with the Britons which succeeded the invasions assuredly gave rise to many new lays, both in Northumbria and Wessex. ‘England,’ says Mr. Stopford Brooke, ‘was conquered to the music of verse, and settled to the sound of the harp.’ But though Alfred and Dunstan knew such songs, they are nearly all lost, or only dimly discerned as the basis of chronicles. At the end of the sixth century, just as the conquest was completed, came Christianity. The natural development of English poetry was to some extent deflected. A religious literature grew up at the hands of priests. Eadhelm, who, anticipating a notion of St. Francis of Assisi, used to stand on a bridge as if he were a gleeman, and waylay the folk as they hurried back from mass, himself wrote pious songs. One of these, a _carmen triviale_, was still sung in the twelfth century[111]. This was in Wessex. In Northumbria, always the most literary district of early England, the lay brother Cædmon founded a school of divine poetry. But even amongst the disciples of Cædmon, some, such as the author of the very martial _Judith_, seem to have designed their work for the mead-hall as well as the monastery[112]. And the regular _scôp_ by no means vanished. The _Wanderer_, a semi-heathen elegiac poem of the early eighth century, seems to be the lament of a _scôp_ driven from his haunts, not by Christianity, but by the tumults of the day[113]. The great poet of the next generation, Cynewulf, himself took treasure of appled gold in the mead-hall. A riddle on ‘the wandering singer’ is ascribed to him[114], and various poems of his school on the fates or the crafts of man bear witness to the continued existence of the class[115]. With the eighth century, except for the songs of war quoted or paraphrased in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, the extant Early English poetry reaches a somewhat inexplicable end. But history comes to the rescue, and enables us still to trace the _scôp_. It is in the guise of a harp-player that Alfred is reported to have fooled the Danes, and Anlaf in his turn to have fooled the Saxons[116]: and mythical as these stories may be, they would not have even been plausible, had not the presence of such folk by the camp-fire been a natural and common event.