of the Empire; and in the provinces the free cultivators of the soil, as well as the free inhabitants of the city, were utterly crushed by the weight of taxation, and sank into a condition little better than slavery. The costs of the ceaseless wars of the Empire had to be wrung from populations which became daily more and more unable to pay. The whole fabric of government and of society began to fall to pieces of itself. Then came the great opportunity of the Teutonic nations, who hemmed in the northern frontier of the Empire. Received into the Empire first as soldiers and colonists, as the central authority crumbled away they took the part of conquerors. In 410 Rome was sacked by Alaric the Goth, and the same century saw the domain of the Empire in Gaul, Italy, and Spain divided amongst the Teutonic emigrants. Britain shared in the fate of the Empire, but in an even sterner degree. The unconquered Kelts of North Britain, known to the Romans as the Picts or Caledo- Fate of nians, were ever a source of trouble to the Roman Britain. government. As the weakness of the Empire increased, the raids of these barbarians on the rich and civilised province became more frequent. In the fourth century we find them harrying Britain in alliance with the Scots, who then inhabited Ireland, and with the Saxons, who are spoken of as a nation of fierce pirates, terrible pests to the coasts of Gaul and Britain. It was in vain that the Romans built their magnificent wall from the Solway to the Tyne as a defence against the Caledonians; they were not able to defend their own defences. About the year 407 the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain to share in the struggles of rebel generals which convulsed the dying Empire; and they never returned. Britain was left without defence, and the curtain falls upon its history; for we have no records of what took place between the withdrawal of the Roman troops and the settlement of the English in the island, except the most fragmentary traditions. DATES. Julius Cæsar first lands in Britain Agricola completes the conquest of Britain. B.C. 55 A.D. 78 . A.D. 407 in Britain. The English settlement in Britain. CHAPTER II. WHEN the curtain slowly rises again, we find the English The oldest English historian, Bede, says that they came here in the year 449. There has been a great deal of dispute as to whether this date is the true one, and whether the English did not settle here a great deal sooner. The last thing that we know about Britain, before the period of darkness begins (when the Roman armies left the island in 407), is that the Saxons were constantly harrying the coasts. At first they probably came only as pirates. Absolute certainty as to the precise year in which they began to settle is not attainable; but our best scholars seem to be now agreed that there is no good reason to reject the account given by Gildas, and followed by Bede, that about the middle of the fifth century, the Britons, driven to despair by the inroads of the Picts, invited the Saxons to help them to drive off their enemies, offering them land in reward for their services. In this manner the first detachment of Saxons landed in Kent, led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, and these were soon followed by a multitude of tribes of the same race. But after overcoming the Picts, the strangers quarrelled with their British allies, and began the conquest of the land for themselves. Probably because the first to harry the British coast had been Saxons, the Britons gave the name of Saxons to the whole race of the new comers. But they called themselves Angel-cyn, or English, the Angles being apparently the most numerous of the tribes who invaded Britain, and the others being so consciously akin to them that they willingly adopted their name. The Teutonic family is divided into three great branches: the High-Dutch, the Low-Dutch, and the Scandinavian; but the two latter have so many points of resemblance The Teutons. that they may almost be considered as one. The High-Dutch dwelt anciently in the high lands of South Germany; their language is now the ruling tongue of Germany, and is therefore called the German language. To the LowDutch, who dwelt mostly in the low countries near the mouths of the rivers flowing into the German Ocean, belong many of the North Germans, the Frisians, Hollanders, and our own English forefathers. These last were not all of one tribe. First there were the Angles, who dwelt, before they came to Britain, in those provinces in the south of Denmark, which are now called Holstein and Schleswig. A small district in Schleswig still keeps the name of Angeln. But the Angles, though the most numerous, were not the only tribe who shared in the conquest of Britain. From the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Oder the whole coast was inhabited by Low-Dutch folk, Saxons, and Frisians, who all contributed to the hosts which set out to win the fair lands of Britain. The conquerors of Kent and the Isle of Wight belonged to the tribe of the Jutes, from Jutland. But it is important to remember that all these Low-Dutch tribes were so near akin that the Britons saw no difference between them, but reckoned them all under the common name of Saxons, a name which their descendants still bear in the speech of the Welshman and the Highlander. The conquerors, however, as we have seen already, called themselves English, and they called their British enemies Welsh, a name which in the old Teutonic languages simply means foreign. It was in 449, then, that the conquest of Britain by the English began; and it went on for three hundred years at least. That is to say, during the whole of that time the English were fighting with the Kelts, more or less, and pushing on their own border ever further towards the West. But the main work of the conquest was done in the first hundred and fifty years. From 449 to the middle of the next century, swarm after swarm of the various Low-Dutch tribes came over to Britain, each host led by some man of royal or noble birth, and settling in Britain, they founded kingdoms there. By the end of the sixth century they had won for themselves a good deal more than half of that part of Britain which lies south of the Firth of Forth. Nature of This conquest was no easy work. The Welshmen fought hard; the English only won the land bit by bit. The exterminating nature of the conquest,. as related by Gildas and Bede, is confirmed by the evidence of English later history and language, which shows a complete break between Roman and English institutions, and conquest. between the Latin and Old-English languages. Christianity, which had come to Britain as it had come to the rest of the Empire, was blotted out along with Roman civilisation, or driven to take shelter in the West. Only a wholesale slaughter Icould have effected this entire breach between British and English history; and such a slaughter the chronicler relates: The priests were everywhere slain before the altars; the prelates and the people, without respect of persons, were destroyed with fire and sword; nor were there any to bury those who had been thus cruelly slaughtered. Some of the miserable remainder, being taken in the mountains, were butchered in heaps. Others, spent with hunger, came forth and yielded themselves to the enemy for the sake of food, being destined to live in perpetual servitude, if they were not killed upon the spot.' Language confirms this last statement, by showing that a few Welsh words, relating to such things as slaves would have to do with, have crept into our English language. But there is no reason to think that a very large number of Welsh slaves were spared, still less that there was any general mixture of Welsh and English blood. For the coming of the English to Britain was not merely a conquest, it was an immigration. The immigrant brings with him his wife and children. And the pride of race was so great in those days, as well as the mutual hatred between Christian and pagan, that it is unlikely that there were many marriages between the English and the Welsh in that part of the country which was conquered at first. Welsh element in the extreme west. In the West of England the case is rather different. The greater part of Somerset, all Devon and Cornwall, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland, were conquered by the English after they had been converted to Christianity. In these parts the Welsh were allowed to live under the protection of the law, though not ranked as equals with the English; and no doubt the folk of some of these countries have as much Welsh blood as English in their veins, though even there what once was Welsh is so overlaid with what now is English, that to-day it is scarcely to be seen at all. In Cornwall, however, this is not the case; it is really as Welsh as Wales itself, and spoke a Welsh tongue till about 150 years ago. So that if we take 1 Bede, Ecc. Hist. i. 15. England as it is now, reckoning Wales as part of it, as well as those English shires which are of Welsh or of mixed blood, we cannot rightly deny that the old Kelts have given something to the making up of the English nation, though the laws, the institutions, and the character of that nation are mainly Teutonic. doms. The Jutes, Saxons, and Angles came to Britain at different times and under different leaders. Instead, therefore, of founding one great kingdom, they began a Early kingnumber of little kingdoms, some of which appear on the scene without any records of their first establishment. The most important of these kingdoms were :-(1) Kent, the first English settlement, founded by Hengist, the Jute; (2) Sussex; (3) Wessex, which covered at first Hampshire, Berks, Wilts, and Dorset, and in later times Somerset and Devon. Sussex and Wessex, as their names indicate, were Saxon kingdoms. (4) Mercia, the midland part of England between the Humber and the Thames. This kingdom seems to have grown up out of the amalgamation of several small Anglian and Saxon kingdoms or settlements. (5) Essex (the East Saxons), comprehending Middlesex and Hertfordshire as well as the present shire. (6) East Anglia, namely Norfolk and Suffolk. (7) The great Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, comprising all the country between the Humber and the Forth, except the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde in the west, which stretched from the river Clyde to the northern boundary of Wales. Besides this kingdom of Strathclyde, Wales also was an independent Keltic kingdom, or rather a union of many little kingdoms, reaching to the Severn at the time when Christianity came to England. Cornwall and Devon formed a third independent Welsh kingdom, called West Wales by the English chroniclers. The period during which England was divided into these little kingdoms is often called the Saxon Heptarchy, a name which means the Seven Kingdoms. The number, however, was often more than seven, sometimes less; and the name gives an idea of a more rigid state of things than could exist in such early times, when the very existence of states was as unsettled as their boundaries. It now behoves us to inquire what sort of people the English were when they came to Britain, and what institutions they brought with them. |