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History of the English People - Book I Early England, 449-1071
The English Conquest of Britain - 449-577
by Green, John Richard (M.A.)
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Old England
For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England
itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country
which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay
within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart
of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its
pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little
townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.
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The English Village
Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.
But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them
to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must
have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their
villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us
in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the
village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the
townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social
centre was the homestead where the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the
first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and
traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or æthel, each in its
little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men
sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in
various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead,
or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled
round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the
community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his
wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
reverence; and it was from him and his fellow æthelings that
host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of
war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition
of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was
equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
"free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never
bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and
sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war
which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless
outrage.
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Justice
Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had
originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time
when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of
English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was
being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The
"blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first
effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's
life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye
for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair
damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong
as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another
custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the
wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the
wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus
made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by
all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been
done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From
this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess
sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his
kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from
wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done.
So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged
before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in
fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or
his guilt that he had to stand or fall.
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The Land
As the blood-bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave
their first forms to English society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honour and
discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty
of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they
fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the
soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick"
or "ham" or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
together in it. In this way the home or "ham" of the Billings was
Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But
in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of
land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become
everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly
the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of
the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession
of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of
absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later
time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and
pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free
villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The
meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common
meadow was fenced off into grass-fields, one for each household in the
village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and division were at an end
again. The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, though
even the plough-land was; subject to fresh division as the number of
claimants grew greater or less.
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Læt and Slave
It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or
ceorl from the unfree man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.
As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their
earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the
village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life,
so the læt was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was
denied, or in some cases perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom the læt
was free enough. He had house and home of his own, his life and limb were
as secure as the ceorl's--save as against his lord; it is probable from
what we see in later laws that as time went on he was recognized as a
member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at
law, and called like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree
as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in the common land
of the village. The ground which he tilled he held of some freeman of the
tribe to whom he paid rent in labour or in kind. And this man was his
lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in the general
social life of his fellow villagers, he had no rights as against his
lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to
render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as
these services were done the land was his own. His lord could not take it
from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for
his services.
Far different from the position of the læt was that of the slave, though
there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a
small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine
drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and
spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a
father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case
the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be
willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as
carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a
freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and
when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
woman-slave she might be burned.
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The Moot
With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
the agreement, the "common sense," the general conviction to which
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such
as those which have made England what she is. The "talk" of the village
moot, the strife and judgement of men giving freely their own rede and
setting it as freely aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of
other men, is the groundwork of English history.
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The Folk
Small therefore as it might be, the township or village was thus the
primary and perfect type of English life, domestic, social, and
political. All that England has been since lay there. But changes of
which we know nothing had long before the time at which our history opens
grouped these little commonwealths together in larger communities,
whether we name them Tribe, People, or Folk. The ties of race and kindred
were no doubt drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, from a common
greed of conquest, a common need of defence. Its form at any rate was
wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of
every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head who
existed only so long as war went on, was the leader whom the host chose
to command it. Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's
council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men
of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the
various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their
name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to
it. In historic times however the regularity of such a military
organization, if it ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas varied
with the varying customs of each district. But men, whether many or few,
were still due from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers to the field.
The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
Germanic races and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future of
mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
of "Aye" or "Nay."
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Social Life
Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England
we know less than of their political life. But there is no ground for
believing them to have been very different in these respects from the
other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though
their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from
being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached
the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and
refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier
Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been
found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than the close of the
third century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely modelled on
Roman metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses
afford a yet more conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
But apart from these outer influences the men of the three tribes were
far from being mere savages. They were fierce warriors, but they were
also busy fishers and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in
handling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which they
hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling sword and spear.
They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the
"ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel
might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose
in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and
dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or
mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang
the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of art
and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings,
amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved in their workmanship the
deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden
buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes with rough jewels
and inlaid with enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like the honour in
which the smith was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn
by their form to be of English workmanship. It is only in the English
pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find
traces of utter rudeness.
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Religion
The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German
peoples. Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of
the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of
the north. The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god,
the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first
ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still
recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German
homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder,
the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of
peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday
may commemorate an obscure god Sætere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet
whom was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends
her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these
floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the death-goddess,
whose memory lingered long in the "Weird" of northern superstition; or
the Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us,
"wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling
javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or
hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our
nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and
sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of
Berkshire; Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of
Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the
purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at
no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his
own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and
English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father
offered to the gods of his hearth.
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The English Temper
It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of
flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have
it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
missionary of the days of Bæda and Boniface who gathered in the very
homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil
of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the
hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with
them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these fifty winters," sings the
hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. "Lives
there no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of them--dare in the
war-strife welcome my onset! Time's change and chances I have abided,
held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never sware I falsely
against right. So for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I
sit here, wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such a temper, strong
with the strength of manhood and full of the vigour and the love of life,
the sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a
pathetic poetry. "Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness
or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the fire ring thee, or
the flood whelm thee, or the sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age
o'ertake thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in darkness." Strong
as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that encompassed him,
that girded his life with a thousand perils and broke it at so short a
span. "To us," cries Beowulf in his last fight, "to us it shall be as our
Weird betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!" But the sadness with
which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries of life and death had
nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids men eat and drink for
to-morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of his fate. The
thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the thought of doom.
"Well shall a man do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome
renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death is better than life of shame!"
cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife with
the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life is short, the more cause to
work bravely till it is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end of his
life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!"
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English Piracy
The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them
to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of
Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at
heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with
tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds
parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance
were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of
fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness
and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by
personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense
of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's "shield-play" and
"sword-game"; the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush
of the host and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons,
helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of
the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to
their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we
catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he plunged into the sea to
meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy
waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love
he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English
verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird"
as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan" as its curved prow breasted
the "swan-road" of the sea.
Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general
movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed
faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of
fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of
vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one
of the war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed,
seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards
fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is
their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that
live on the pillage of the world!"
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Britain
Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and
they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of
the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy
of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear
as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island
was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year
before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
and a century after Cæsar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its
conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over
the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the Roman
frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work
of civilization followed fast on the work of the sword. To the last
indeed the distance of the island from the seat of empire left her less
Romanized than any other province of the west. The bulk of the population
scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung
to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some
traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilization
rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was
thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own
municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a
network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the island to
the other, manners, language, political life, all were of Rome.
For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports amongst which London held the
first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But
evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told at last on the
province of Britain. Wealth and population alike declined under a
crushing system of taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry,
under a despotism which crushed out all local independence. And with
decay within came danger from without. For centuries past the Roman
frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the
Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube
or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled
the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It was this mass
of savage barbarism which broke upon the Empire as it sank into decay. In
its western dominions the triumph of these assailants was complete. The
Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered and
colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians
encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths
ruled at last in Italy itself.
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Conquests of Jute and Saxon
It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment the
province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these
its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants then
bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon pirates, as
we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
thirty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but civil
strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last
on the fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom while striving
to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. By the
usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was drawn for this
purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at
their head. If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in
the land which from that time they made their own, it is with this
landing of Hengest's war-band that English history begins. They landed on
the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No
spot can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the
tread of English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet
itself, a mere lift of ground with a few grey cottages dotted over it,
cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But
taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay;
far away to the left across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark
the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly towards
Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the national
tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers; for the
physical changes of the country since the fifth century have told little
on its main features. At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of
sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and through this inlet
the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind to what
was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.
The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over
when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
have flocked from the Channel to their settlement in Thanet; the inlet
between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won their
first victory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at
the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of the Cray
drove the British forces in terror upon London; but the ground was soon
won back again, and it was not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts
which had gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive
struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so terrible that
from this moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems to have been
abandoned, and it was only along its southern shore that the Britons held
their ground. Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over, and
with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which
they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
English conqueror was done.
The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames and
leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future
landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of
Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "Ælle and
Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and
slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left."
But Hengest and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed to the great
downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the
strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory
at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set the crown of the
West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt around it checked
any further advance; and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders as they pressed
westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a long pause in the
Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested a
series of victories whose history is lost was giving to men of the same
Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
probable however that the strength of Camulodunum, the predecessor of our
modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants a slow and
doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled the East-Saxons to
occupy the territory to which they have given their name of Essex a line
of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Forests
checked their further advance into the island.
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Conquests of the Eagle
Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head, from
the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
unconquered: and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by the
third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which was
to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on the people which
sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that they won. The
Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of Northumbria
and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by
the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia. But it was not till the
moment we have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto held
the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the Humber and the
Trent. This great river-line led like a highway into the heart of
Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of British
resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the predecessor of our
Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make
a fresh and desperate stand.
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Conquests of West-Saxons
It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the
West-Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive
within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort
of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march
of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in 571 made them masters of the districts
which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing along the upper
valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from
their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester,
Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings
to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at
Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of
the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the borders of
Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently
brought again to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing
defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses
still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, "the white
town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green
woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins
where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the
halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without light, without song,"
their stillness broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has
swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
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