Next follow fragmentary narratives of seventh-century voyages. Two “testimonies” are given of the exploits of the Saxon king, Edwin, with his conquest of the Isles of Man and Anglesey and the other northwestern islands of the Britons lying between Britain and Ireland, in the year 624. The second of these “testimonies” related how Edwin also subdued to the crown of England the Hebrides, “commonly called the Western Islands.” Then is reproduced the story of the voyage of Bertus, “general of an army sent into Ireland by Ecfridus [Ecgfrith] king of Northumberland” in the year 684. This warrior, the chronicler relates, “miserably wasted that innocent nation being always most friendly unto the people of England,” sparing neither churches nor monasteries, while the Islanders “repelled arms with arms and craving God’s aid from heaven with continual imprecations and curses they pleaded for revenge.”
The first recorded English voyage having discovery with expansion of trade for its object was that of one Octher to the northward, at the close of the ninth century, about the year 890. Octher was a prosperous whale-hunter, of Heligoland in the North Sea. The special purpose of his venture was to “increase the knowledge” of the northern coasts and countries “for the more commodity of fishing of horse-whales which have in their teeth bones of great price and excellence.” He found what he sought, and brought home some specimens of big whalebones, which he presented to the English king. The skins of the horse-whales he reported were “very good to make cables for ships, and so used” by the hardy dwellers on these coasts. A few years earlier Sighelmus, Bishop of Sheburne, as messenger of King “Alphred” (Ælfrid), bearing alms and gifts to the king of Rome, had penetrated into India, and returned to England with costly spices and divers strange and precious stones, many of which stones long after remained in the monuments of the church. Following Octher one Wolstan made a navigation into the sound of Denmark, of which brief account is given.
With these narrations of voyages for conquest and trade are interwoven tales of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, “for devotion’s sake,” and imagined relief from the penalties of sin, forerunners of the Crusades of succeeding centuries. Earliest of all chronicled is the legend of the “Travaile of Helena,” in the fourth century, before 337. She was Helena Flavia Augusta, afterward the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine “the Great,” emperor and king of Britain. She became a Christian when Constantine was converted. By reason of her “singular beauty, faith, religion, goodness, and godly majesty,” she was “famous in all the world.” She was “skilful in divinity,” and wrote and composed “divers books and certain Greek verses.” She made the perilous journey to Jerusalem toward the close of a long life, being “warned by some visions,” and piously visited “all the places that Christ had frequented.” She is said to have discovered “the holy sepulchre and the true cross.” Then follows a note on Constantine’s travels to Greece, Egypt, and Persia, in about 339. He “overthrew the false gods of the heathen, and by many laws, often revived, he abrogated the worshipping of images in all the countries of Greece, Egypt, Persia, Asia, and the whole Roman empire, commanding Christ only to be worshipped.”