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Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain
The English In Their New Homes
by Allen, Grant (B.A.)
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If any trust at all can be placed in the legends, a lull in the conquest
followed the first settlement, and for some fifty years the English—or
at least the West Saxons—were engaged in consolidating their own
dominions, without making any further attack upon those of the Welsh. It
may be well, therefore, to enquire what changes of manners had come over
them in consequence of their change of place from the shores of the
Baltic and the North Sea to those of the Channel and the German Ocean.
As a whole, English society remained much the same in Britain as it had
been in Sleswick and North Holland. The English came over in a body,
with their women and children, their flocks and herds, their goods and
chattels. The peculiar breed of cattle which they brought with them may
still be distinguished in their remains from the earlier Celtic
short-horn associated with Roman ruins and pre-historic barrows. They
came as settlers, not as mere marauders; and they remained banded
together in their original tribes and families after they had occupied
the soil of Britain.
From the moment of their landing in Britain the savage corsairs of the
Sleswick flats seem wholly to have laid aside their seafaring habits.
They built no more ships, apparently; for many years after Bishop
Wilfrith had to teach the South Saxons how to catch sea-fish; while
during the early Danish incursions we hear distinctly that the English
had no vessels; nor is there much incidental mention of shipping between
the age of the settlement and that of Ælfred. The new-comers took up
their abode at once on the richest parts of Roman Britain, and came into
full enjoyment of orchards which they had not planted and fields which
they had not sown. The state of cultivation in which they found the vale
of York and the Kentish glens must have been widely different from that
to which they were accustomed in their old heath-clad home. Accordingly,
they settled down at once into farmers and landowners on a far larger
scale than of yore; and they were not anxious to move away from the rich
lands which they had so easily acquired. From being sailors and graziers
they took to be agriculturists and landmen. In the towns, indeed, they
did not settle; and most of these continued to bear their old Roman or
Celtic titles. A few may have been destroyed, especially in the first
onset, like Anderida, and, at a later date, Chester; but the greater
number seem to have been still scantily inhabited, under English
protection, by a mixed urban population, mainly Celtic in blood, and
known by the name of Loegrians. It was in the country, however, that the
English conquerers took up their abode. They were tillers of the soil,
not merchants or skippers, and it was long before they acquired a taste
for urban life. The whole eastern half of England is filled with
villages bearing the characteristic English clan names, and marking each
the home of a distinct family of early settlers. As soon as the
new-comers had burnt the villa of the old Roman proprietor, and killed,
driven out, or enslaved his abandoned serfs, they took the land to
themselves and divided it out on their national system. Hence the whole
government and social organisation of England is purely Teutonic, and
the country even lost its old name of Britain for its new one of
England.
In England, as of old in Sleswick, the village community formed the unit
of English society. Each such township was still bounded by its mark of
forest, mere, or fen, which divided it from its nearest neighbours. In
each lived a single clan, supposed to be of kindred blood and bearing a
common name. The marksmen and their serfs, the latter being conquered
Welshmen, cultivated the soil under cereals for bread, and also for an
unnecessarily large supply of beer, as we learn at a later date from
numerous charters. Cattle and horses grazed in the pastures, while large
herds of pigs were kept in the forest which formed the mark. Thus the
early English settled down at once from a nation of pirates into one of
agriculturists. Here and there, among the woods and fens which still
covered a large part of the country, their little separate communities
rose in small fenced clearings or on low islets, now joined by drainage
to the mainland; while in the wider valleys, tilled in Roman times, the
wealthier chieftains formed their settlements and allotted lands to
their Welsh tributaries. Many family names appear in different parts of
England, for a reason which will hereafter be explained. Thus we find
the Bassingas at Bassingbourn, in Cambridgeshire; at Bassingfield, in
Notts; at Bassingham and Bassingthorpe, in Lincolnshire; and at
Bassington, in Northumberland. The Billings have left their stamp at
Billing, in Northampton; Billingford, in Norfolk; Billingham, in Durham;
Billingley, in Yorkshire; Billinghurst, in Sussex; and five other places
in various other counties. Birmingham, Nottingham, Wellington,
Faringdon, Warrington, and Wallingford are well-known names formed on
the same analogy. How thickly these clan settlements lie scattered over
Teutonic England may be judged from the number which occur in the London
district alone—Kensington, Paddington, Notting-hill, Billingsgate,
Islington, Newington, Kennington, Wapping, and Teddington. There are
altogether 1,400 names of this type in England. Their value as a test of
Teutonic colonisation is shown by the fact that while 48 occur in
Northumberland, 127 in Yorkshire, 76 in Lincolnshire, 153 in Norfolk and
Suffolk, 48 in Essex, 60 in Kent, and 86 in Sussex and Surrey, only 2
are found in Cornwall, 6 in Cumberland, 24 in Devon, 13 in Worcester, 2
in Westmoreland, and none in Monmouth. Speaking generally, these clan
names are thickest along the original English coast, from Forth to
Portland; they decrease rapidly as we move inland; and they die away
altogether as we approach the purely Celtic west.
The English families, however, probably tilled the soil by the aid of
Welsh slaves; indeed, in Anglo-Saxon, the word serf and Welshman are
used almost interchangeably as equivalent synonyms. But though many
Welshmen were doubtless spared from the very first, nothing is more
certain than the fact that they became thoroughly Anglicized. A few new
words from Welsh or Latin were introduced into the English tongue, but
they were far too few sensibly to affect its vocabulary. The language
was and still is essentially Low German; and though it now contains
numerous words of Latin or French origin, it does not and never did
contain any but the very smallest Celtic element. The slight number of
additions made from the Welsh consisted chiefly of words connected with
the higher Roman civilisation—such as wall, street, and chester—or the
new methods of agriculture which the Teuton learnt from his more
civilised serfs. The Celt has always shown a great tendency to cast
aside his native language in Gaul, in Spain, and in Ireland; and the
isolation of the English townships must have had the effect of greatly
accelerating the process. Within a few generations the Celtic slave had
forgotten his tongue, his origin, and his religion, and had developed
into a pagan English serf. Whatever else the Teutonic conquest did, it
turned every man within the English pale into a thorough Englishman.
But the removal to Britain effected one immense change. "War begat the
king." In Sleswick the English had lived within their little marks as
free and independent communities. In Britain all the clans of each
colony gradually came under the military command of a king. The
ealdormen who led the various marauding bands assumed royal power in the
new country. Such a change was indeed inevitable. For not only had the
English to win the new England, but they had also to keep it and extend
it. During four hundred years a constant smouldering warfare was carried
on between the foreigners and the native Welsh on their western
frontier. Thus the townships of each colony entered into a closer union
with one another for military purposes, and so arose the separate
chieftainships or petty kingdoms of early England. But the king's power
was originally very small. He was merely the semi-hereditary general and
representative of the people, of royal stock, but elected by the free
suffrages of the freemen. Only as the kingdoms coalesced, and as the
power of meeting became consequently less, did the king acquire his
greater prerogatives. From the first, however, he seems to have
possessed the right of granting public lands, with the consent of the
freemen, to particular individuals; and such book-land, as the early
English called it, after the introduction of Roman writing, became the
origin of our system of private property in land.
Every township had its moot or assembly of freemen, which met around the
sacred oak, or on some holy hill, or beside the great stone monument of
some forgotten Celtic chieftain. Every hundred also had its moot, and
many of these still survive in their original form to the present day,
being held in the open air, near some sacred site or conspicuous
landmark. And the colony as a whole had also its moot, at which all
freemen might attend, and which settled the general affairs of the
kingdom. At these last-named moots the kings were elected; and though
the selection was practically confined to men of royal kin, the king
nevertheless represented the free choice of the tribe. Before the
conversion to Christianity, the royal families all traced their origin
to Woden. Thus the pedigree of Ida, King of Northumbria, runs as
follows:—"Ida was Eopping, Eoppa was Esing, Esa was Inguing, Ingui
Angenwiting, Angenwit Alocing, Aloc Benocing, Benoc Branding, Brand
Baldæging, Bældæg Wodening." But in later Christian times the
chroniclers felt the necessity of reconciling these heathen genealogies
with the Scriptural account in Genesis; so they affiliated Woden himself
upon the Hebrew patriarchs. Thus the pedigree of the West Saxon kings,
inserted in the Chronicle under the year 855, after conveying back the
genealogy of Æthelwulf to Woden, continues to say, "Woden was
Frealafing, Frealaf Finning," and so on till it reaches "Sceafing, id
est filius Noe; he was born in Noe's Ark. Lamech, Mathusalem, Enoc,
Jared, Malalehel, Camon, Enos, Seth, Adam, primus homo et pater
noster."
The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Eastern and Southern Britain,
were a horde of barbarous heathen pirates. They massacred or enslaved
the civilised or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants with savage
ruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed the monuments of Roman occupation.
They let the roads and cities fall into utter disrepair. They stamped
out Christianity with fire and sword from end to end of their new
domain. They occupied a civilised and Christian land, and they restored
it to its primitive barbarism. Nor was there any improvement until
Christian teachers from Rome and Scotland once more introduced the
forgotten culture which the English pirates had utterly destroyed. As
Gildas phrases it, with true Celtic eloquence, the red tongue of flame
licked up the whole land from end to end, till it slaked its horrid
thirst in the western ocean. For 150 years the whole of English Britain,
save, perhaps, Kent and London, was cut off from all intercourse with
Christendom and the Roman world. The country consisted of several petty
chieftainships, at constant feud with their Teutonic neighbours, and
perpetually waging a border war with Welsh, Picts, and Scots. Within
each colony, much of the land remained untilled, while the clan
settlements appeared like little islands of cultivation in the midst of
forest, waste, and common. The villages were mere groups of wooden
homesteads, with barns and cattle-sheds, surrounded by rough stockades,
and destitute of roads or communications. Even the palace of the king
was a long wooden hall with numerous outhouses; for the English built no
stone houses, and burnt down those of their Roman predecessors. Trade
seems to have been confined to the south coast, and few manufactured
articles of any sort were in use. The English degraded their Celtic
serfs to their own barbaric level; and the very memory of Roman
civilization almost died out of the land for a hundred and fifty years.
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