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Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain
The English Settle In Britain
by Allen, Grant (B.A.)
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Proximity to the sea turns robbers into corsairs. When predatory tribes
reach the seaboard they always take to piracy, provided they have
attained the shipbuilding level of culture. In the ancient Ægean, in the
Malay Archipelago, in the China seas, we see the same process always
taking place. Probably from the first period of their severance from the
main Aryan stock in Central Asia, the Low German race and their
ancestors had been a predatory and conquering people, for ever engaged
in raids and smouldering warfare with their neighbours. When they
reached the Baltic and the islands of the Frisian coast, they grew
naturally into a nation of pirates. Even during the bronze age, we find
sculptured stones with representations of long row-boats, manned by
several oarsmen, and in one or two cases actually bearing a rude sail.
Their prows and sterns stand high out of the water, and are adorned with
intricate carvings. They seem like the predecessors of the long
ships—snakes and sea-dragons—which afterwards bore the northern
corsairs into every river of Europe. Such boats, adapted for long
sea-voyages, show a considerable intercourse, piratical or commercial,
between the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian North and other distant
countries. Certainly, from the earliest days of Roman rule on the German
Ocean to the thirteenth century, the Low Dutch and Scandinavian tribes
carried on an almost unbroken course of expeditions by sea, beginning in
every case with mere descents upon the coast for the purposes of
plunder, but ending, as a rule, with regular colonisation or political
supremacy. In this manner the people of the Baltic and the North Sea
ravaged or settled in every country on the sea-shore, from Orkney,
Shetland, and the Faroes, to Normandy, Apulia, and Greece; from Boulogne
and Kent, to Iceland, Greenland, and, perhaps, America. The colonisation
of South-Eastern Britain was but the first chapter in this long history
of predatory excursions on the part of the Low German peoples.
The piratical ships of the early English were row-boats of very simple
construction. We actually possess one undoubted specimen at the present
day, whose very date is fixed for us by the circumstances of its
discovery. It was dug up, some years since, from a peat-bog in Sleswick,
the old England of our forefathers, along with iron arms and implements,
and in association with Roman coins ranging in date from A.D. 67 to A.D.
217. It may therefore be pretty confidently assigned to the first half
of the third century. In this interesting relic, then, we have one of
the identical boats in which the descents upon the British coast were
first made. The craft is rudely built of oaken boards, and is seventy
feet long by nine broad. The stem and stern are alike in shape, and the
boat is fitted for being beached upon the foreshore. A sculptured stone
at Häggeby, in Uplande, roughly represents for us such a ship under way,
probably of about the same date. It is rowed with twelve pairs of oars,
and has no sails; and it contains no other persons but the rowers and a
coxswain, who acted doubtless as leader of the expedition. Such a boat
might convey about 120 fighting men.
There are some grounds for believing that, even before the establishment
of the Roman power in Britain, Teutonic pirates from the northern
marshlands were already in the habit of plundering the Celtic
inhabitants of the country between the Wash and the mouth of the Thames;
and it is possible that an English colony may, even then, have
established itself in the modern Lincolnshire. But, be this as it may,
we know at least that during the period of the Roman occupation, Low
German adventurers were constantly engaged in descending upon the
exposed coasts of the English Channel and the North Sea. The Low German
tribe nearest to the Roman provinces was that of the Saxons, and
accordingly these Teutonic pirates, of whatever race, were known as
Saxons by the provincials, and all Englishmen are still so called by the
modern Celts, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
The outlying Roman provinces were close at hand, easy to reach, rich,
ill-defended, and a tempting prey for the barbaric tribesmen of the
north. Setting out in their light open skiffs from the islands at the
mouth of the Elbe, or off the shore afterwards submerged in what is now
the Zuyder Zee, the English or Saxon pirates crossed the sea with the
prevalent north-east wind, and landed all along the provincial coasts of
Gaul and Britain. As the empire decayed under the assaults of the Goths,
their ravages turned into regular settlements. One great body pillaged,
age after age, the neighbourhood of Bayeux, where, before the middle of
the fifth century, it established a flourishing colony, and where the
towns and villages all still bear names of Saxon origin. Another horde
first plundered and then took up its abode near Boulogne, where local
names of the English patronymic type also abound to the present day. In
Britain itself, at a date not later than the end of the fourth century,
we find (in the "Notitia Imperil") an officer who bears the title of
Count of the Saxon Shore, and whose jurisdiction extended from
Lincolnshire to Southampton Water. The title probably indicates that
piratical incursions had already set in on Britain, and the duty of the
count was most likely that of repelling the English invaders.
As soon as the Romans found themselves compelled to withdraw their
garrison from Britain, leaving the provinces to defend themselves as
best they might, the temptation to the English pirates became a thousand
times stronger than before. Though the so-called history of the
conquest, handed down to us by Bæda and the
"English Chronicle,"[1] is
now considered by many enquirers to be mythical in almost every
particular, the facts themselves speak out for us with unhesitating
certainty. We know that about the middle of the fifth century, shortly
after the withdrawal of the regular Roman troops, several bodies of
heathen Anglo-Saxons, belonging to the three tribes of Jutes, English,
and Saxons, settled en masse on the south-eastern shores of Britain,
from the Firth of Forth to the Isle of Wight. The age of mere plundering
descents was decisively over, and the age of settlement and colonisation
had set in. These heathen Anglo-Saxons drove away, exterminated, or
enslaved the Romanised and Christianised Celts, broke down every vestige
of Roman civilisation, destroyed the churches, burnt the villas, laid
waste many of the towns, and re-introduced a long period of pagan
barbarism. For a while Britain remains enveloped in an age of complete
uncertainty, and heathen myths intervene between the Christian
historical period of the Romans and the Christian historical period
initiated by the conversion of Kent. Of South-Eastern Britain under the
pagan Anglo-Saxons we know practically nothing, save by inference and
analogy, or by the scanty evidence of archæology.
According to tradition the Jutes came first. In 449, says the Celtic
legend (the date is quite untrustworthy), they landed in Kent, where
they first settled in Ruim, which we English call Thanet—then really an
island, and gradually spread themselves over the mainland, capturing the
great Roman fortress of Rochester and coast land as far as London.
Though the details of this story are full of mythical absurdities, the
analogy of the later Danish colonies gives it an air of great
probability, as the Danes always settled first in islands or peninsulas,
and thence proceeded to overrun, and finally to annex, the adjacent
district. A second Jutish horde established itself in the Isle of Wight
and on the opposite shore of Hampshire. But the whole share borne by the
Jutes in the settlement of Britain seems to have been but small.
The Saxons came second in time, if we may believe the legends. In 477,
Ælle, with his three sons, is said to have landed on the south coast,
where he founded the colony of the South Saxons, or Sussex. In 495,
Cerdic and Cynric led another kindred horde to the south-western shore,
and made the first settlement of the West Saxons, or Wessex. Of the
beginnings of the East Saxon community in Essex, and of the Middle
Saxons in Middlesex, we know little, even by tradition. The Saxons
undoubtedly came over in large numbers; but a considerable body of their
fellow-tribesmen still remained upon the Continent, where they were
still independent and unconverted up to the time of Karl the Great.
The English, on the other hand, apparently migrated in a body. There is
no trace of any Englishmen in Denmark or Germany after the exodus to
Britain. Their language, of which a dialect still survives in Friesland,
has utterly died out in Sleswick. The English took for their share of
Britain the nearest east coast. We have little record of their arrival,
even in the legendary story; we merely learn that in 547, Ida "succeeded
to the kingdom" of the Northumbrians, whence we may possibly conclude
that the colony was already established. The English settlement extended
from the Forth to Essex, and was subdivided into Bernicia, Deira, and
East Anglia.
Wherever the Anglo-Saxons came, their first work was to stamp out with
fire and sword every trace of the Roman civilisation. Modern
investigations amongst pagan Anglo-Saxon barrows in Britain show the Low
German race as pure barbarians, great at destruction, but incapable of
constructive work. Professor Rolleston, who has opened several of these
early heathen tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhere
abundant evidence of "their great aptness at destroying, and their great
slowness in elaborating, material civilisation." Until the Anglo-Saxon
received from the Continent the Christian religion and the Roman
culture, he was a mere average Aryan barbarian, with a strong taste for
war and plunder, but with small love for any of the arts of peace.
Wherever else, in Gaul, Spain, or Italy, the Teutonic barbarians came in
contact with the Roman civilisation, they received the religion of
Christ, and the arts of the conquered people, during or before their
conquest of the country. But in Britain the Teutonic invaders remained
pagans long after their settlement in the island; and they utterly
destroyed, in the south-eastern tract, almost every relic of the Roman
rule and of the Christian faith. Hence we have here the curious fact
that, during the fifth and sixth centuries, a belt of intrusive and
aggressive heathendom intervenes between the Christians of the Continent
and the Christian Welsh and Irish of western Britain. The Church of the
Celtic Welsh was cut off for more than a hundred years from the Churches
of the Roman world by a hostile and impassable barrier of heathen
English, Jutes, and Saxons. Their separation produced many momentous
effects on the after history both of the Welsh themselves and of their
English conquerors.
[1] For
an account of these two main authorities see further
on, Bæda in chapter xi., and the "Chronicle" in chapter
xviii.
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