[Illustration: BRITAIN IN A. D. 500]

EARLY BRITAIN. 

ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

BY

GRANT ALLEN, B. A. 

PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE OF GENERAL LITERATURE ANDEDUCATION APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 

LONDON:SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, S. W. ;43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E. C. ; 48, PICCADILLY, W. ;AND 135, NORTH STREET, BRIGHTON. 

NEW YORK: E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 

PREFACE. 

This little book is an attempt to give a brief sketch of Britain underthe early English conquerors, rather from the social than from thepolitical point of view. For that purpose not much has been said aboutthe doings of kings and statesmen; but attention has been mainlydirected towards the less obvious evidence afforded us by existingmonuments as to the life and mode of thought of the people themselves. The principal object throughout has been to estimate the importance ofthose elements in modern British life which are chiefly due to purelyEnglish or Low-Dutch influences. 

The original authorities most largely consulted have been, first andabove all, the "English Chronicle, " and to an almost equal extent, Bæda's "Ecclesiastical History. " These have been supplemented, wherenecessary, by Florence of Worcester and the other Latin writers of laterdate. I have not thought it needful, however, to repeat any of thegossiping stories from William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, andtheir compeers, which make up the bulk of our early history as told inmost modern books. Still less have I paid any attention to the romancesof Geoffrey of Monmouth. Gildas, Nennius, and the other Welsh tractshave been sparingly employed, and always with a reference by name. Asserhas been used with caution, where his information seems to be reallycontemporary. I have also derived some occasional hints from the oldBritish bards, from _Beowulf_, from the laws, and from the charters inthe "Codex Diplomaticus. " These written documents have been helped outby some personal study of the actual early English relics preserved invarious museums, and by the indirect evidence of local nomenclature. 

Among modern books, I owe my acknowledgments in the first and highestdegree to Dr. E. A. Freeman, from whose great and just authority, however, I have occasionally ventured to differ in some minor matters. Next, my acknowledgments are due to Canon Stubbs, to Mr. Kemble, and toMr. J. R. Green. Dr. Guest's valuable papers in the Transactions of theArchæological Institute have supplied many useful suggestions. ToLappenberg and Sir Francis Palgrave I am also indebted for variousdetails. Professor Rolleston's contributions to "Archæologia, " as wellas his Appendix to Canon Greenwell's "British Barrows, " have beenconsulted for anthropological and antiquarian points; on which alsoProfessor Huxley and Mr. Akerman have published useful papers. ProfessorBoyd Dawkins's work on "Early Man in Britain, " as well as the writingsof Worsaae and Steenstrup have helped in elucidating the condition ofthe English at the date of the Conquest. Nor must I forget the aidderived from Mr. Isaac Taylor's "Words and Places, " from ProfessorHenry Morley's "English Literature, " and from Messrs. Haddan and Stubbs'"Councils. " To Mr. Gomme, Mr. E. B. Tylor, Mr. Sweet, Mr. James Collier, Dr. H. Leo, and perhaps others, I am under various obligations; and ifany acknowledgments have been overlooked, I trust the injured personwill forgive me when I have had already to quote so many authorities forso small a book. The popular character of the work renders itundesirable to load the pages with footnotes of reference; and scholarswill generally see for themselves the source of the information given inthe text. 

Personally, my thanks are due to my friend, Mr. York Powell, for muchvaluable aid and assistance, and to the Rev. E. McClure, one of theSociety's secretaries, for his kind revision of the volume in proof, andfor several suggestions of which I have gladly availed myself. 

As various early English names and phrases occur throughout the book, itwill be best, perhaps, to say a few words about their pronunciationhere, rather than to leave over that subject to the chapter on theAnglo-Saxon language, near the close of the work. A few notes on thismatter are therefore appended below. 

The simple vowels, as a rule, have their continental pronunciation, approximately thus: _ā_ as in _father_, _ă_ as in _ask_; _ē_ as in_there_, _ĕ_ as in _men_; _ī_ as in _marine_, _ĭ_ as _fit_; _ō_ asin _note_, _ŏ_ as in _not_; _ū_ as in _brute_, _ŭ_ as in _full_; _ȳ_as in _grün_ (German), _y̆_ as in _hübsch_ (German). The quantity ofthe vowels is not marked in this work. _Æ_ is not a diphthong, but asimple vowel sound, the same as our own short _a_ in _man_, _that_, &c. _Ea_ is pronounced like _ya_. _C_ is always hard, like _k_; and _g_ isalso always hard, as in _begin_: they must _never_ be pronounced like_s_ or _j_. The other consonants have the same values as in modernEnglish. No vowel or consonant is ever mute. Hence we get the followingapproximate pronunciations: Ælfred and Æthelred, as if written Alfredand Athelred; Æthelstan and Dunstan, as Athelstahn and Doonstahn;Eadwine and Oswine, nearly as Yahd-weena and Ose-weena; Wulfsige andSigeberht, as Wolf-seeg-a and Seeg-a-bayrt; Ceolred and Cynewulf, asKeole-red and Küne-wolf. These approximations look a little absurd whenwritten down in the only modern phonetic equivalents; but that is thefault of our own existing spelling, not of the early English namesthemselves. 

G. A. 

ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 

At a period earlier than the dawn of written history there livedsomewhere among the great table-lands and plains of Central Asia a raceknown to us only by the uncertain name of Aryans. These Aryans were afair-skinned and well-built people, long past the stage of aboriginalsavagery, and possessed of a considerable degree of primitive culture. Though mainly pastoral in habit, they were acquainted with tillage, andthey grew for themselves at least one kind of cereal grain. They spoke alanguage whose existence and nature we infer from the remnants of itwhich survive in the tongues of their descendants, and from theseremnants we are able to judge, in some measure, of their civilisationand their modes of thought. The indications thus preserved for us showthe Aryans to have been a simple and fierce community of early warriors, farmers, and shepherds, still in a partially nomad condition, livingunder a patriarchal rule, originally ignorant of all metals save gold, but possessing weapons and implements of stone, [1] and worshipping astheir chief god the open heaven. We must not regard them as an idyllicand peaceable people: on the contrary, they were the fiercest and mostconquering tribe ever known. In mental power and in plasticity ofmanners, however, they probably rose far superior to any race thenliving, except only the Semitic nations of the Mediterranean coast. 

 [1] Professor Boyd Dawkins has shown that the Continental Celts were still in their stone age when they invaded Europe; whence we must conclude that the original Aryans were unacquainted with the use of bronze. 

From the common Central Asian home, colonies of warlike Aryans graduallydispersed themselves, still in the pre-historic period, under pressureof population or hostile invasion, over many districts of Europe andAsia. Some of them moved southward, across the passes of Afghanistan, and occupied the fertile plains of the Indus and the Ganges, where theybecame the ancestors of the Brahmans and other modern high-casteHindoos. The language which they took with them to their new settlementsbeyond the Himalayas was the Sanskrit, which still remains to this daythe nearest of all dialects that we now possess to the primitive Aryanspeech. From it are derived the chief modern tongues of northern India, from the Vindhyas to the Hindu Kush. Other Aryan tribes settled in themountain districts west of Hindustan; and yet others found themselves ahome in the hills of Iran or Persia, where they still preserve an allieddialect of the ancient mother tongue. 

But the mass of the emigrants from the Central Asian fatherland movedfurther westward in successive waves, and occupied, one after another, the midland plains and mountainous peninsulas of Europe. First of all, apparently, came the Celts, who spread slowly across the South of Russiaand Germany, and who are found at the dawn of authentic historyextending over the entire western coasts and islands of the continent, from Spain to Scotland. Mingled in many places with the still earliernon-Aryan aborigines–perhaps Iberians and Euskarians, a short andswarthy race, armed only with weapons of polished stone, and representedat the present day by the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Asturias–theCelts held rule in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, up to the date of theseveral Roman conquests. A second great wave of Aryan immigration, thatof the Hellenic and Italian races, broke over the shores of the _Ægean_and the Adriatic, where their cognate languages have become familiar tous in the two extreme and typical forms of the classical Greek andLatin. A third wave was that of the Teutonic or German people, whofollowed and drove out the Celts over a large part of central andwestern Europe; while a fourth and final swarm was that of the Slavonictribes, which still inhabit only the extreme eastern portion of thecontinent. 

With the Slavonians we shall have nothing to do in this enquiry; andwith the Greek and Italian races we need only deal very incidentally. But the Celts, whom the English invaders found in possession of allBritain when they began their settlements in the island, form thesubject of another volume in this series, and will necessarily call forsome small portion of our attention here also; while it is to theGermanic race that the English stock itself actually belongs, so that wemust examine somewhat more closely the course of Germanic immigrationthrough Europe, and the nature of the primitive Teutonic civilisation. 

The Germanic family of peoples consisted of a race which early split upinto two great hordes or stocks, speaking dialects which differedslightly from one another through the action of the variouscircumstances to which they were each exposed. These two stocks are theHigh German and the Low German (with which last may be included theGothic and the Scandinavian). Moving across Europe from east to west, they slowly drove out the Celts from Germany and the central plains, andtook possession of the whole district between the Alps, the Rhine, andthe Baltic, which formed their limits at the period when they first cameinto contact with the Roman power. The Goths, living in closestproximity to the empire, fell upon it during the decline and decay ofRome, settled in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and becoming absorbed in themass of the native population, disappear altogether from history as adistinguishable nationality. But the High and Low Germans retain to thepresent day their distinctive language and features; and the latterbranch, to which the English people belong, still lives for the mostpart in the same lands which it has held ever since the date of theearly Germanic immigration. 

The Low Germans, in the third century after Christ, occupied in the mainthe belt of flat country between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine. Between them and the old High German Swabians lay a race intermediate intongue and blood, the Franks. The Low Germans were divided, like mostother barbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes, whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the fewauthorities which remain to us. We must not expect to find among themthe definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather such avagueness as that which characterised the loose confederacies of NorthAmerican Indians or the various shifting peoples of South Africa. Butthere are three of their tribes which stand fairly well marked off fromone another in early history, and which bore, at least, the chief sharein the colonisation of Britain. These three tribes are the Jutes, theEnglish, and the Saxons. Closely connected with them, but less strictlybound in the same family tie, were the Frisians. 

The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, lived in the marshyforests and along the winding fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsulaof Denmark, which still preserves their name in our own day. The Englishdwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad neck of the peninsula, whichwe now call Sleswick. And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied theflat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to that of the Rhine. At the period when history lifts the curtain upon the future Germaniccolonists of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of thelow-lying lands around the Baltic and the North Sea, and closelyconnected with other tribes on either side, such as the Frisians and theDanes, who still speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavianlanguages. 

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the relationship betweenthe first Teutonic settlers in Britain and their continental brethren. Not only are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly connectedwith the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in thecolonisation of the island at all; and more closely connected with theFrisians, some of whom probably accompanied the earliest piraticalhordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a later date in allthe northern counties: but they are also most closely connected of allwith those members of the colonising tribes who did not themselves beara share in the settlement, and whose descendants are still living inDenmark and in various parts of Germany. The English proper, it is true, seem to have deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body; so that, according to Bæda, the Christian historian of Northumberland, in histime this oldest England by the shores of the Baltic lay waste andunpeopled, through the completeness of the exodus. But the Jutes appearto have migrated in small numbers, while the larger part of the triberemained at home in their native marshland; and of the more numerousSaxons, though a great swarm went out to conquer southern Britain, avast body was still left behind in Germany, where it continuedindependent and pagan till the time of Karl the Great, long after theTeutonic colonists of Britain had grown into peaceable and civilisedChristians. It is from the statements of later historians with regard tothese continental Saxons that our knowledge of the early English customsand institutions, during the continental period of English history, mustbe mainly inferred. We gather our picture of the English and Saxons whofirst came to this country from the picture drawn for us of those amongtheir brethren whom they left behind in the primitive English home. 

These three tribes, the Jutes, the English, and the Saxons, had not yet, apparently, advanced far enough in the idea of national unity to possessa separate general name, distinguishing them altogether from the othertribes of the Germanic stock. Most probably they did not regardthemselves at this period as a single nation at all, or even as moreclosely bound to one another than to the surrounding and kindred tribes. They may have united at times for purposes of a special war; but theirunion was merely analogous to that of two North American peoples, or twomodern European nations, pursuing a common policy for awhile. At a laterdate, in Britain, the three tribes learned to call themselvescollectively by the name of that one among them which earliest rose tosupremacy–the English; and the whole southern half of the island cameto be known by their name as England. Even from the first it seemsprobable that their language was spoken of as English only, andcomparatively little as Saxon. But since it would be inconvenient to usethe name of one dominant tribe alone, the English, as equivalent tothose of the three, and since it is desirable to have a common title forall the Germanic colonists of Britain, whenever it is necessary to speakof them together, we shall employ the late and, strictly speaking, incorrect form of "Anglo-Saxons" for this purpose. Similarly, in orderto distinguish the earliest pure form of the English language from itslater modern form, now largely enriched and altered by the addition ofRomance or Latin words and the disuse of native ones, we shall alwaysspeak of it, where distinction is necessary, as Anglo-Saxon. The term isnow too deeply rooted in our language to be again uprooted; and it has, besides, the merit of supplying a want. At the same time, it should beremembered that the expression Anglo-Saxon is purely artificial, and wasnever used by the people themselves in describing their fellows or theirtongue. When they did not speak of themselves as Jutes, English, andSaxons respectively, they spoke of themselves as English alone. 

CHAPTER II. 

THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 

From the notices left us by Bæda in Britain, and by Nithard and otherson the continent, of the habits and manners which distinguished thoseSaxons who remained in the old fatherland, we are able to form some ideaof the primitive condition of those other Saxons, English, and Jutes, who afterwards colonized Britain, during the period while they still alllived together in the heather-clad wastes and marshy lowlands of Denmarkand Northern Germany. The early heathen poem of _Beowulf_ also gives usa glimpse of their ideas and their mode of thought. The known physicalcharacteristics of the race, the nature of the country which theyinhabited, the analogy of other Germanic tribes, and the recentdiscoveries of pre-historic archæology, all help us to piece out afairly consistent picture of their appearance, their manner of life, andtheir rude political institutions. 

We must begin by dismissing from our minds all those modern notionswhich are almost inevitably implied by the use of language directlyderived from that of our heathen ancestors, but now mixed up in ourconceptions with the most advanced forms of European civilisation. Wemust not allow such words as "king" and "English" to mislead us into aspecies of filial blindness to the real nature of our Teutonicforefathers. The little community of wild farmers and warriors who livedamong the dim woodlands of Sleswick, beside the swampy margin of theNorth Sea, has grown into the nucleus of a vast empire, only verypartially Germanic in blood, and enriched by all the alien culture ofEgypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome. But as it still preserves theidentical tongue of its early barbarous days, we are naturally temptedto read our modern acquired feelings into the simple but familiar termsemployed by our continental predecessors. What the early English calleda king we should now-a-days call a chief; what they called a meeting ofwise men we should now-a-days call a palaver. In fact, we must recollectthat we are dealing with a purely barbaric race–not savage, indeed, norwithout a certain rude culture of its own, the result of long centuriesof previous development; yet essentially military and predatory in itshabits, and akin in its material civilisation to many races which we nowregard as immeasurably our inferiors. If we wish for a modern equivalentof the primitive Anglo-Saxon level of culture, we may perhaps best findit in the Kurds of the Turkish and Persian frontier, or in the Mahrattasof the wild mountain region of the western Deccan. 

The early English in Sleswick and Friesland had partially reached theagricultural stage of civilisation. They tilled little plots of groundin the forest; but they depended more largely for subsistence upon theircattle, and they were also hunters and trappers in the great belts ofwoodland or marsh which everywhere surrounded their isolated villages. They were acquainted with the use of bronze from the first period oftheir settlement in Europe, and some of the battle-axes or shields whichthey manufactured from this metal were beautifully chased with exquisitedecorative patterns, equalling in taste the ornamental designs stillemployed by the Polynesian islanders. Such weapons, however, weredoubtless intended for the use of the chieftains only, and were probablyemployed as insignia of rank alone. They are still discovered in thebarrows which cover the remains of the early chieftains; though it ispossible that they may really belong to the monuments of a yet earlierrace. But iron was certainly employed by the English, at least, fromabout the first century of the Christian era, and its use was perhapsintroduced into the marshlands of Sleswick by the Germanic conquerors ofthe north. Even at this early date, abundant proof exists of mercantileintercourse with the Roman world (probably through Pannonia), wherebythe alien culture of the south was already engrafted in part upon thelow civilisation of the native English. Amber was then exported from theBaltic, while gold, silver, and glass beads were given in return. Romancoins are discovered in Low German tombs of the first five centuries inSleswick, Holstein, Friesland, and the Isles; and Roman patterns areimitated in the iron weapons and utensils of the same period. Goldbyzants of the fifth century prove an intercourse with Constantinopleat the exact date of the colonisation of Britain. From the very earliestmoment when we catch a glimpse of its nature, the home-grown Englishculture had already begun to be modified by the superior arts of Rome. Even the alphabet was known and used in its Runic form, though theabsence of writing materials caused its employment to be restricted toinscriptions on wooden tablets, on rude stone monuments, or on utensilsof metal-work. A golden drinking-horn found in Sleswick, and engravedwith the maker's name, referred to the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest known specimen of the English language. 

The early English society was founded entirely on the tie of blood. Every clan or family lived by itself and formed a guild for mutualprotection, each kinsman being his brother's keeper, and bound to avengehis death by feud with the tribe or clan which had killed him. This dutyof blood-revenge was the supreme religion of the race. Moreover, theclan was answerable as a whole for the ill-deeds of all its members; andthe fine payable for murder or injury was handed over by the family ofthe wrong-doer to the family of the injured man. 

Each little village of the old English community possessed a generalindependence of its own, and lay apart from all the others, oftensurrounded by a broad belt or mark of virgin forest. It consisted of aclearing like those of the American backwoods, where a single family orkindred had made its home, and preserved its separate independenceintact. Each of these families was known by the name of its real orsupposed ancestor, the patronymic being formed by the addition of thesyllable _ing_. Thus the descendants of Ælla would be called Ællings, and their _ham_ or stockade would be known as Ællingaham, or in modernform Allingham. So the _tun_ or enclosure of the Culmings would beCulmingatun, similarly modernised into Culmington. Names of this typeabound in the newer England at the present day; as in the case ofBirmingham, Buckingham, Wellington, Kensington, Basingstoke, andPaddington. But while in America the clearing is merely a temporaryphase, and the border of forest is soon cut down so as to connect thevillage with its neighbours, in the old Anglo-Saxon fatherland theborder of woodland, heath, or fen was jealously guarded as a frontierand natural defence for the little predatory and agricultural community. Whoever crossed it was bound to give notice of his coming by blowing ahorn; else he was cut down at once as a stealthy enemy. The marksmenwished to remain separate from all others, and only to mix with those oftheir own kin. In this primitive love of separation we have the germ ofthat local independence and that isolated private home life which is oneof the most marked characteristics of modern Englishmen. 

In the middle of the clearing, surrounded by a wooden stockade, stoodthe village, a group of rude detached huts. The marksmen each possesseda separate little homestead, consisting usually of a small wooden houseor shanty, a courtyard, and a cattle-fold. So far, private property inland had already begun. But the forest and the pasture land were notappropriated: each man had a right from year to year to let loose hiskine or horses on a certain equal or proportionate space of landassigned to him by the village in council. The wealth of the peopleconsisted mainly in cattle which fed on the pasture, and pigs turned outto fatten on the acorns of the forest: but a small portion of the soilwas ploughed and sown; and this portion also was distributed to thevillagers for tillage by annual arrangement. The hall of the chief rosein the midst of the lesser houses, open to all comers. The village moot, or assembly of freemen, met in the open air, under some sacred tree, orbeside some old monumental stone, often a relic of the older aboriginalrace, marking the tomb of a dead chieftain, but worshipped as a god bythe English immigrants. At these informal meetings, every head of afamily had a right to appear and deliberate. The primitive Englishconstitution was a pure republican aristocracy or oligarchy ofhouseholders, like that which still survives in the Swiss forestcantons. 

But there were yet distinctions of rank in the villages and in the loosetribes formed by their union for purposes of war or otherwise. Thepeople were divided into three classes of _æthelings_ or chieftains, _freolings_ or freemen, and _theows_ or slaves. The _æthelings_ were thenobles and rulers of each tribe. There was no king: but when the tribesjoined together in a war, their _æthelings_ cast lots together, andwhoever drew the winning lot was made commander for the time being. Assoon as the war was over, each tribe returned to its own independence. Indeed, the only really coherent body was the village or kindred: andthe whole course of early English history consists of a long and tediouseffort at increased national unity, which was never fully realised tillthe Norman conquerors bound the whole nation together in the firm graspof William, Henry, and Edward. 

In personal appearance, the primitive Anglo-Saxons were typical Germansof very unmixed blood. Tall, fair-haired, and gray-eyed, their limbswere large and stout, and their heads of the round or brachycephalictype, common to most Aryan races. They did not intermarry with othernations, preserving their Germanic blood pure and unadulterated. But asthey had slaves, and as these slaves must in many cases have beencaptives spared in war, we must suppose that such descriptions apply, strictly speaking, to the freemen and chieftains alone. The slaves mightbe of any race, and in process of time they must have learnt to speakEnglish, and their children must have become English in all but blood. Many of them, indeed, would probably be actually English on the father'sside, though born of slave mothers. Hence we must be careful not tointerpret the expressions of historians, who would be thinking of thefree classes only, and especially of the nobles, as though they appliedto the slaves as well. Wherever slavery exists, the blood of the slavecommunity is necessarily very mixed. The picture which the heathenEnglish have drawn of themselves in _Beowulf_ is one of savage pirates, clad in shirts of ring-armour, and greedy of gold and ale. Fighting anddrinking are their two delights. The noblest leader is he who builds agreat hall, throws it open for his people to carouse in, and liberallydeals out beer, and bracelets, and money at the feast. The joy of battleis keen in their breasts. The sea and the storm are welcome to them. They are fearless and greedy pirates, not ashamed of living by thestrong hand alone. 

In creed, the English were pagans, having a religion of beliefs ratherthan of rites. Their chief deity, perhaps, was a form of the old AryanSky-god, who took with them the guise of Thunor or Thunder (inScandinavian, Thor), an angry warrior hurling his hammer, thethunder-bolt, from the stormy clouds. These thunder-bolts were oftenfound buried in the earth; and being really the polished stone-axes ofthe earlier inhabitants, they do actually resemble a hammer in shape. But Woden, the special god of the Teutonic race, had practically usurpedthe highest place in their mythology: he is represented as the leader ofthe Germans in their exodus from Asia to north-western Europe, and sinceall the pedigrees of their chieftains were traced back to Woden, it isnot improbable that he may have been really a deified ancestor of theprincipal Germanic families. The popular creed, however, was mainly oneof lesser gods, such as elves, ogres, giants, and monsters, inhabitantsof the mark and fen, stories of whom still survive in English villagesas folk-lore or fairy tales. A few legends of the pagan time arepreserved for us in Christian books. _Beowulf_ is rich in allusions tothese ancient superstitions. If we may build upon the slender materialswhich alone are available, it would seem that the dead chieftains wereburied in barrows, and ghost-worship was practised at their tombs. Thetemples were mere stockades of wood, with rude blocks or monoliths torepresent deities and altars. Probably their few rites consisted merelyof human or other sacrifices to the gods or the ghosts of departedchiefs. There was a regular priesthood of the great gods, but each manwas priest for his own household. As in most other heathen communities, the real worship of the people was mainly directed to the special familydeities of every hearth. The great gods were appealed to by thechieftains and by the race in battle: but the household gods or deifiedancestors received the chief homage of the churls by their ownfiresides. 

Thus the Anglo-Saxons, before the great exodus from Denmark and NorthGermany, appear as a race of fierce, cruel, and barbaric pagans, delighting in the sea, in slaughter, and in drink. They dwelt in littleisolated communities, bound together internally by ties of blood, anduniting occasionally with others only for purposes of rapine. They liveda life which mainly alternated between grazing, piratical seafaring, andcattle-lifting; always on the war-trail against the possessions ofothers, when they were not specially engaged in taking care of theirown. Every record and every indication shows them to us as fiercerheathen prototypes of the Scotch clans in the most lawless days of theHighlands. Incapable of union for any peaceful purpose at home, theylearned their earliest lesson of subordination in their piraticalattacks upon the civilised Christian community of Roman Britain. Wefirst meet with them in history in the character of destroyers andsea-robbers. Yet they possessed already in their wild marshy home thegerms of those free institutions which have made the history of Englandunique amongst the nations of Europe. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN. 

Proximity to the sea turns robbers into corsairs. When predatory tribesreach the seaboard they always take to piracy, provided they haveattained the shipbuilding level of culture. In the ancient Ægean, in theMalay Archipelago, in the China seas, we see the same process alwaystaking place. Probably from the first period of their severance from themain Aryan stock in Central Asia, the Low German race and theirancestors had been a predatory and conquering people, for ever engagedin raids and smouldering warfare with their neighbours. When theyreached the Baltic and the islands of the Frisian coast, they grewnaturally into a nation of pirates. Even during the bronze age, we findsculptured stones with representations of long row-boats, manned byseveral 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 withintricate carvings. They seem like the predecessors of the longships–snakes and sea-dragons–which afterwards bore the northerncorsairs into every river of Europe. Such boats, adapted for longsea-voyages, show a considerable intercourse, piratical or commercial, between the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian North and other distantcountries. Certainly, from the earliest days of Roman rule on the GermanOcean to the thirteenth century, the Low Dutch and Scandinavian tribescarried on an almost unbroken course of expeditions by sea, beginning inevery case with mere descents upon the coast for the purposes ofplunder, but ending, as a rule, with regular colonisation or politicalsupremacy. In this manner the people of the Baltic and the North Searavaged or settled in every country on the sea-shore, from Orkney, Shetland, and the Faroes, to Normandy, Apulia, and Greece; from Boulogneand Kent, to Iceland, Greenland, and, perhaps, America. The colonisationof South-Eastern Britain was but the first chapter in this long historyof predatory excursions on the part of the Low German peoples. 

The piratical ships of the early English were row-boats of very simpleconstruction. We actually possess one undoubted specimen at the presentday, whose very date is fixed for us by the circumstances of itsdiscovery. 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 halfof the third century. In this interesting relic, then, we have one ofthe identical boats in which the descents upon the British coast werefirst made. The craft is rudely built of oaken boards, and is seventyfeet long by nine broad. The stem and stern are alike in shape, and theboat is fitted for being beached upon the foreshore. A sculptured stoneat 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 acoxswain, who acted doubtless as leader of the expedition. Such a boatmight convey about 120 fighting men. 

There are some grounds for believing that, even before the establishmentof the Roman power in Britain, Teutonic pirates from the northernmarshlands were already in the habit of plundering the Celticinhabitants of the country between the Wash and the mouth of the Thames;and it is possible that an English colony may, even then, haveestablished itself in the modern Lincolnshire. But, be this as it may, we know at least that during the period of the Roman occupation, LowGerman adventurers were constantly engaged in descending upon theexposed coasts of the English Channel and the North Sea. The Low Germantribe nearest to the Roman provinces was that of the Saxons, andaccordingly these Teutonic pirates, of whatever race, were known asSaxons by the provincials, and all Englishmen are still so called by themodern 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 thenorth. Setting out in their light open skiffs from the islands at themouth of the Elbe, or off the shore afterwards submerged in what is nowthe Zuyder Zee, the English or Saxon pirates crossed the sea with theprevalent north-east wind, and landed all along the provincial coasts ofGaul 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 ofthe fifth century, it established a flourishing colony, and where thetowns and villages all still bear names of Saxon origin. Another hordefirst plundered and then took up its abode near Boulogne, where localnames of the English patronymic type also abound to the present day. InBritain 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 ofCount of the Saxon Shore, and whose jurisdiction extended fromLincolnshire to Southampton Water. The title probably indicates thatpiratical incursions had already set in on Britain, and the duty of thecount was most likely that of repelling the English invaders. 

As soon as the Romans found themselves compelled to withdraw theirgarrison from Britain, leaving the provinces to defend themselves asbest they might, the temptation to the English pirates became a thousandtimes stronger than before. Though the so-called history of theconquest, handed down to us by Bæda and the "English Chronicle, "[1] isnow considered by many enquirers to be mythical in almost everyparticular, the facts themselves speak out for us with unhesitatingcertainty. We know that about the middle of the fifth century, shortlyafter the withdrawal of the regular Roman troops, several bodies ofheathen 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 plunderingdescents was decisively over, and the age of settlement and colonisationhad set in. These heathen Anglo-Saxons drove away, exterminated, orenslaved the Romanised and Christianised Celts, broke down every vestigeof Roman civilisation, destroyed the churches, burnt the villas, laidwaste many of the towns, and re-introduced a long period of paganbarbarism. For a while Britain remains enveloped in an age of completeuncertainty, and heathen myths intervene between the Christianhistorical period of the Romans and the Christian historical periodinitiated by the conversion of Kent. Of South-Eastern Britain under thepagan Anglo-Saxons we know practically nothing, save by inference andanalogy, or by the scanty evidence of archæology. 

 [1] For an account of these two main authorities see further on, Bæda in chapter xi. , and the "Chronicle" in chapter xviii. 

According to tradition the Jutes came first. In 449, says the Celticlegend (the date is quite untrustworthy), they landed in Kent, wherethey first settled in Ruim, which we English call Thanet–then really anisland, and gradually spread themselves over the mainland, capturing thegreat Roman fortress of Rochester and coast land as far as London. Though the details of this story are full of mythical absurdities, theanalogy of the later Danish colonies gives it an air of greatprobability, as the Danes always settled first in islands or peninsulas, and thence proceeded to overrun, and finally to annex, the adjacentdistrict. A second Jutish horde established itself in the Isle of Wightand on the opposite shore of Hampshire. But the whole share borne by theJutes 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 thebeginnings of the East Saxon community in Essex, and of the MiddleSaxons in Middlesex, we know little, even by tradition. The Saxonsundoubtedly came over in large numbers; but a considerable body of theirfellow-tribesmen still remained upon the Continent, where they werestill independent and unconverted up to the time of Karl the Great. 

The English, on the other hand, apparently migrated in a body. There isno trace of any Englishmen in Denmark or Germany after the exodus toBritain. Their language, of which a dialect still survives in Friesland, has utterly died out in Sleswick. The English took for their share ofBritain the nearest east coast. We have little record of their arrival, even in the legendary story; we merely learn that in 547, Ida "succeededto the kingdom" of the Northumbrians, whence we may possibly concludethat the colony was already established. The English settlement extendedfrom the Forth to Essex, and was subdivided into Bernicia, Deira, andEast Anglia. 

Wherever the Anglo-Saxons came, their first work was to stamp out withfire and sword every trace of the Roman civilisation. Moderninvestigations amongst pagan Anglo-Saxon barrows in Britain show the LowGerman race as pure barbarians, great at destruction, but incapable ofconstructive work. Professor Rolleston, who has opened several of theseearly heathen tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhereabundant evidence of "their great aptness at destroying, and their greatslowness in elaborating, material civilisation. " Until the Anglo-Saxonreceived from the Continent the Christian religion and the Romanculture, he was a mere average Aryan barbarian, with a strong taste forwar and plunder, but with small love for any of the arts of peace. Wherever else, in Gaul, Spain, or Italy, the Teutonic barbarians came incontact with the Roman civilisation, they received the religion ofChrist, and the arts of the conquered people, during or before theirconquest of the country. But in Britain the Teutonic invaders remainedpagans long after their settlement in the island; and they utterlydestroyed, in the south-eastern tract, almost every relic of the Romanrule and of the Christian faith. Hence we have here the curious factthat, during the fifth and sixth centuries, a belt of intrusive andaggressive heathendom intervenes between the Christians of the Continentand the Christian Welsh and Irish of western Britain. The Church of theCeltic Welsh was cut off for more than a hundred years from the Churchesof the Roman world by a hostile and impassable barrier of heathenEnglish, Jutes, and Saxons. Their separation produced many momentouseffects on the after history both of the Welsh themselves and of theirEnglish conquerors. 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 

Though the myths which surround the arrival of the English in Britainhave little historical value, they are yet interesting for the lightwhich they throw incidentally upon the habits and modes of thought ofthe colonists. They have one character in common with all other legends, that they grow fuller and more circumstantial the further they proceedfrom the original time. Bæda, who wrote about A. D. 700, gives them in avery meagre form: the English Chronicle, compiled at the court ofÆlfred, about A. D. 900, adds several important traditional particulars:while with the romantic Geoffrey of Monmouth, A. D. 1152, they assume thecharacter of full and circumstantial tales. The less men knew about theconquest, the more they had to tell about it. 

Among the most sacred animals of the Aryan race was the horse. Even inthe Indian epics, the sacrifice of a horse was the highest rite of theprimitive religion. Tacitus tells us that the Germans kept sacred whitehorses at the public expense, in the groves and woods of the gods: andthat from their neighings and snortings, auguries were taken. Amongstthe people of the northern marshlands, the white horse seems to havebeen held in especial honour, and to this day a white horse rampantforms the cognisance of Hanover and Brunswick. The English settlersbrought this, their national emblem, with them to Britain, and cut itsfigure on the chalk downs as they advanced westward, to mark theprogress of their conquest. The white horses on the Berkshire andWiltshire hills still bear witness to their settlement. A white horse iseven now the symbol of Kent. Hence it is not surprising to learn that inthe legendary story of the first colonisation, the Jutish leaders wholed the earliest Teutonic host into Thanet should bear the names ofHengest and Horsa, the stallion and the mare. They came in threekeels–a ridiculously inadequate number, considering their size and thenecessities of a conquering army: and they settled in 449 (for thelegends are always most precise where they are least historical) in theIsle of Thanet. "A multitude of whelps, " says the Welsh monk Gildas, "came forth from the lair of the barbaric lioness, in three cyuls, asthey call them. " Vortigern, King of the Welsh, had invited them to cometo his aid against the Picts of North Britain and the Scots of Ireland, who were making piratical incursions into the deserted province, leftunprotected through the heavy levies made by the departing Romans. TheJutes attacked and conquered the Gaels, but then turned against theirWelsh allies. 

In 455, the Jutes advanced from Thanet to conquer the whole of Kent, "and Hengest and Horsa fought with Vortigern the king, " says the EnglishChronicle, "at the place that is cleped Æglesthrep; and there men slewHorsa his brother, and after that Hengest came to rule, and Æsc hisson. " One year later, Hengest and Æsc fought once more with the Welsh atCrayford, "and offslew 4, 000 men; and the Britons then forsookKent-land, and fled with mickle awe to London-bury. " In this account wemay see a dim recollection of the settlement of the two petty Jutishkingdoms in Kent, with their respective capitals at Canterbury andRochester, whose separate dioceses still point back to the two originalprincipalities. It may be worth while to note, too, that the name Æscmeans the ash-tree; and that this tree was as sacred among plants as thehorse was among animals. 

Nevertheless, a kernel of truth doubtless lingers in the traditionalstory. Thanet was afterwards one of the first landing-places of theDanes: and its isolated position–for a broad belt of sea then separatedthe island from the Kentish main–would make it a natural post to beassigned by the Welsh to their doubtful piratical allies. The inlet wasguarded by the great Roman fortress of Rhutupiæ: and after the fall ofthat important stronghold, the English may probably have occupied theprincipality of East Kent, with its capital of Canterbury. The walls ofRochester may have held out longer: and the West Kentish kingdom maywell have been founded by two successful battles at the passage of theMedway and the Cray. 

The legend as to the settlement of Sussex is of much the same sort. In477, Ælle the Saxon came to Britain also with the suspiciouslysymmetrical number of three ships. With him came his three sons, Kymen, Wlencing, and Cissa. These names are obviously invented to account forthose of three important places in the South-Saxon chieftainship. Thehost landed at Kymenes ora, probably Keynor, in the Bill of Selsey, then, as its title imports, a separate island girt round by the tidalsea: their capital and, in days after the Norman conquest, theircathedral was at Cissan-ceaster, the Roman Regnum, now Chichester: whilethe third name survives in the modern village of Lancing, near Shoreham. The Saxons at once fought the natives "and offslew many Welsh, and drovesome in flight into the wood that is named Andredes-leag, " now the Wealdof Kent and Sussex. A little colony thus occupied the western half ofthe modern county: but the eastern portion still remained in the handsof the Welsh. For awhile the great Roman fortress of Anderida (nowPevensey) held out against the invaders; until in 491 "Ælle and Cissabeset Anderida, and offslew all that were therein; nor was there aftereven one Briton left alive. " All Sussex became a single Saxon kingdom, ringed round by the great forest of the Weald. Here again the obviouslyunhistorical character of the main facts throws the utmost doubt uponthe nature of the details. Yet, in this case too, the central ideaitself is likely enough, -–that the South Saxons first occupied thesolitary coast islet of Selsey; then conquered the fortress of Regnumand the western shore as far as Eastbourne; and finally capturedAnderida and the eastern half of the county up to the line of theRomney marshes. 

Even more improbable is the story of the Saxon settlement on the moredistant portion of the south coast. In 495 "came twain aldermen toBritain, Cerdic and Cynric his son, with five ships, at that place thatis cleped Cerdices ora, and fought that ilk day with the Welsh. "Clearly, the name of Cerdic may be invented solely to account for thename of the place: since we see by the sequel that the English freelyimagined such personages as pegs on which to hang their mythicalhistory. [1] For, six years later, one Port landed at Portsmouth with twoships, and there slew a Welsh nobleman. But we know positively that thename of Portsmouth comes from the Latin _Portus_; and therefore Portmust have been simply invented to explain the unknown derivation. Stillmore flagrant is the case of Wihtgar, who conquered the Isle of Wight, and was buried at Wihtgarasbyrig, or Carisbrooke. For the origin of thatname is really quite different: the Wiht-ware or Wiht-gare are the menof Wight, just as the Cant-ware are the men of Kent: and Wiht-gara-byrigis the Wight-men's-bury, just as Cant-wara-byrig or Canterbury is theKent-men's-bury. Moreover, a double story is told in the Chronicle as tothe original colonisation of Wessex; the first attributing the conquestto Cerdic and Cynric, and the second to Stuf and Wihtgar. 

 [1] Cerdic is apparently a British rather than an English name, since Bæda mentions a certain "Cerdic, rex Brettonum. " This may have been a Caradoc. Perhaps the first element in the names Cerdices ora, Cerdices ford, &c. , was older than the English conquest. The legends are invariably connected with local names. 

The only other existing legend refers to the great English kingdom ofNorthumbria: and about it the English Chronicle, which is mainly WestSaxon in origin, merely tells us in dry terms under the year 547, "HereIda came to rule. " There are no details, even of the meagre kind, vouchsafed in the south; no account of the conquest of the great Romantown of York, or of the resistance offered by the powerful Brigantiantribes. But a fragment of some old Northumbrian tradition, embedded inthe later and spurious Welsh compilation which bears the name ofNennius, tells us a not improbable tale–that the first settlement onthe coast of the Lothians was made as early as the conquest of Kent, byJutes of the same stock as those who colonised Thanet. A hundred yearslater, the Welsh poems seem to say, Ida "the flame-bearer, " fought hisway down from a petty principality on the Forth, and occupied the wholeNorthumbrian coast, in spite of the stubborn guerilla warfare of thedespairing provincials. Still less do we learn about the beginnings ofMercia, the powerful English kingdom which occupied the midlands; orabout the first colonisation of East Anglia. In short, the legends ofthe settlement, unhistorical and meagre as they are, refer only to theJutish and Saxon conquests in the south, and tell us nothing at allabout the origin of the main English kingdoms in the north. It isimportant to bear in mind this fact, because the current conceptions asto the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race and the extermination of thenative Welsh are largely based upon the very limited accounts of theconquest of Kent and Sussex, and the mournful dirges of the Welsh monksor bards. 

It seems improbable, however, that the north-eastern coast of Britain, naturally exposed above every other part to the ravages of northernpirates, and in later days the head-quarters of the Danish intruders inour island, should so long have remained free from English incursions. If the Teutonic settlers really first established themselves here acentury later than their conquest of Kent, we can only account for it bythe supposition that York and the Brigantes, the old metropolis of theprovinces, held out far more stubbornly and successfully than Rochesterand Anderida, with their very servile Romanised population. But even thewords of the Chronicle do not necessarily imply that Ida was the firstking of the Northumbrians, or that the settlement of the country tookplace in his days. [2] And if they did, we need not feel bound to accepttheir testimony, considering that the earliest date we can assign forthe composition of the chronicle is the reign of Ælfred: while Bæda, theearlier native Northumbrian historian, throws no light at all upon thequestion. Hence it seems probable that Nennius preserves a truthfultradition, and that the English settled in the region between the Forthand the Tyne, at least as early as the Jutes settled in Kent or theSaxons along the South Coast, from Pevensey Bay to Southampton Water. 

 [2] A remarkable passage in the Third Continuator of Florence mentions Hyring as the first king of Bernicia, followed by Woden and five other mythical personages, before Ida. Clearly, this is mere unhistorical guesswork on the part of the monk of Bury; but it may enclose a genuine tradition so far as Hyring is concerned. 

If, then, we leave out of consideration the etymological myths andnumerical absurdities of the English or Welsh legends, and look only atthe facts disclosed to us by the subsequent condition of the country, weshall find that the early Anglo-Saxon settlements took place somewhatafter this wise. In the extreme north, the English apparently did notcare to settle in the rugged mountain country between Aberdeen andEdinburgh, inhabited by the free and warlike Picts. But from the Firthof Forth to the borders of Essex, a succession of colonies, belonging tothe restricted English tribe, occupied the whole provincial coast, burning, plundering, and massacring in many places as they went. Firstand northernmost of all came the people whom we know by their Latinisedtitle of Bernicians, and who descended upon the rocky braes betweenForth and Tyne. These are the English of Ida's kingdom, the modernLothians and Northumberland. Their chief town was at Bebbanburh, nowBamborough, which Ida "timbered, and betyned it with a hedge. " Next ingeographical order stood the people of Deira, or Yorkshire, who occupiedthe rich agricultural valley of the Ouse, the fertile alluvial tract ofHolderness, and the bleak coast-line from Tyne to Humber. Whether theyconquered the Roman capital of York, or whether it made terms with theinvaders, we do not know; but it is not mentioned as the chief town ofthe English kings before the days of Eadwine, under whom the twoNorthumbrian chieftainships were united into a single kingdom. However, as Eadwine assumed some of the imperial Roman trappings, it seems notunlikely that a portion at least of the Romanised population survivedthe conquest. The two principalities probably spread back politically inmost places as far as the watershed which separates the basins of theGerman Ocean and the Irish Sea; but the English population seems to havelived mainly along the coast or in the fertile valley of the Ouse andits tributaries; for Elmet and Loidis, two Welsh principalities, longheld out in the Leeds district, and the people of the dales and theinland parts, as we shall see reason hereafter to conclude, even nowshow evident marks of Celtic descent. Together the two chieftainshipswere generally known by the name of Northumberland, now confined totheir central portion; but it must never be forgotten that the Lothians, which at present form part of modern Scotland, were originally a portionof this early English kingdom, and are still, perhaps, more purelyEnglish in blood and speech than any other district in our island. 

From Humber to the Wash was occupied by a second English colony, the menof Lincolnshire, divided into three minor tribes, one of which, theGainas, has left its name to Gainsborough. Here, again, we hear nothingof the conquest, nor of the means by which the powerful Roman colony ofLincoln fell into the hands of the English. But the town still retainsits Roman name, and in part its Roman walls; so that we may conclude thenative population was not entirely exterminated. 

East Anglia, as its name imports, was likewise colonised by an Englishhorde, divided, like the men of Kent, into two minor bodies, the NorthFolk and the South Folk, whose names survive in the modern counties ofNorfolk and Suffolk. But in East Anglia, as in Yorkshire, we shall seereason hereafter to conclude that the lower orders of Welsh were largelyspared, and that their descendants still form in part the labouringclasses of the two counties. Here, too, the English settlers probablyclustered thickest along the coast, like the Danes in later days; andthe great swampy expanse of the Fens, then a mere waste of marshlandtenanted by beavers and wild fowl, formed the inland boundary or mark oftheir almost insular kingdom. 

The southern half of the coast was peopled by Englishmen of the Saxonand Jutish tribes. First came the country of the East Saxons, or Essex, the flat land stretching from the borders of East Anglia to the estuaryof the Thames. This had been one of the most thickly-populated Romanregions, containing the important stations of Camalodunum, London, andVerulam. But we know nothing, even by report, of its conquest. Beyondit, and separated by the fenland of the Lea, lay the outlying littleprincipality of Middlesex. The upper reaches of the Thames were stillin the hands of the Welsh natives, for the great merchant city of Londonblocked the way for the pirates to the head-waters of the river. 

On the south side of the estuary lay the Jutish principalities of Eastand West Kent, including the strong Roman posts of Rhutupiæ, Dover, Rochester, and Canterbury. The great forest of the Weald and the RomneyMarshes separated them from Sussex; and the insular positions of Thanetand Sheppey had always special attractions for the northern pirates. 

Beyond the marshes, again, the strip of southern shore, between thedowns and the sea, as far as Hayling Island, fell into the hands of theSouth Saxons, whose boundary to the east was formed by Romney Marsh, andto the west by the flats near Chichester, where the forest runs down tothe tidal swamp by the sea. The district north of the Weald, now knownas Surrey, was also peopled by Saxon freebooters, at a later date, though doubtless far more sparsely. 

Finally, along the wooded coast from Portsmouth to Poole Harbour, theGewissas, afterwards known as the West Saxons, established their power. The Isle of Wight and the region about Southampton Water, however, wereoccupied by the Meonwaras, a small intrusive colony of Jutes. Up therich valley overlooked by the great Roman city of Winchester (VentaBelgarum), the West Saxons made their way, not without severeopposition, as their own legends and traditions tell us; and inWinchester they fixed their capital for awhile. The long chain of chalkdowns behind the city formed their weak northern mark or boundary, while to the west they seem always to have carried on a desultorywarfare with the yet unsubdued Welsh, commanded by their great leaderAmbrosius, who has left his name to Ambres-byrig, or Amesbury. 

We must not, however, suppose that each of these colonies had from thefirst a united existence as a political community. We know that even theeight or ten kingdoms into which England was divided at the dawn of thehistorical period were each themselves produced by the consolidation ofseveral still smaller chieftainships. Even in the two petty Kentishkingdoms there were under-kings, who had once been independent. Wightwas a distinct kingdom till the reign of Ceadwalla in Wessex. The laterprovince of Mercia was composed of minor divisions, known as theHwiccas, the Middle English, the West Hecan, and so forth. Henry ofHuntingdon, a historian of the twelfth century, who had access, however, to several valuable and original sources of information now lost, tellsus that many chieftains came from Germany, occupied Mercia and EastAnglia, and often fought with one another for the supremacy. In fact, the petty kingdoms of the eighth century were themselves the result of aconsolidation of many forgotten principalities founded by the firstconquerors. 

Thus the earliest England with which we are historically acquaintedconsisted of a mere long strip or borderland of Teutonic coast, dividedinto tiny chieftainships, and girding round half of the eastern andsouthern shores of a still Celtic Britain. Its area was discontinuous, and its inland boundaries towards the back country were vaguely defined. As Massachusetts and Connecticut stood off from Virginia and Georgia–asNew South Wales and Victoria stand off from South Australia andQueensland–so Northumbria stood off from East Anglia, and Kent fromSussex. Each colony represented a little English nucleus along the coastor up the mouths of the greater rivers, such as the Thames and Humber, where the pirates could easily drive in their light craft. From such anucleus, perched at first on some steep promontory like Bamborough, someseparate island like Thanet, Wight, and Selsey, or some long spit ofland like Holderness and Hurst Castle, the barbarians could extend theirdominions on every side, till they reached some natural line ofdemarcation in the direction of their nearest Teutonic neighbours, whichformed their necessary mark. Inland they spread as far as they couldconquer; but coastwise the rivers and fens were their limits against oneanother. Thus this oldest insular England is marked off into at leasteight separate colonies by the Forth, the Tyne, the Humber, the Wash, the Harwich Marshes, the Thames, the Weald Forest, and the Chichestertidal swamp region. As to how the pirates settled down along this widestretch of coast, we know practically nothing; of their westward advancewe know a little, and as time proceeds, that knowledge becomes more andmore. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 

If any trust at all can be placed in the legends, a lull in the conquestfollowed the first settlement, and for some fifty years the English–orat least the West Saxons–were engaged in consolidating their owndominions, without making any further attack upon those of the Welsh. Itmay be well, therefore, to enquire what changes of manners had come overthem in consequence of their change of place from the shores of theBaltic 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 hadbeen in Sleswick and North Holland. The English came over in a body, with their women and children, their flocks and herds, their goods andchattels. The peculiar breed of cattle which they brought with them maystill be distinguished in their remains from the earlier Celticshort-horn associated with Roman ruins and pre-historic barrows. Theycame as settlers, not as mere marauders; and they remained bandedtogether in their original tribes and families after they had occupiedthe soil of Britain. 

From the moment of their landing in Britain the savage corsairs of theSleswick flats seem wholly to have laid aside their seafaring habits. They built no more ships, apparently; for many years after BishopWilfrith had to teach the South Saxons how to catch sea-fish; whileduring the early Danish incursions we hear distinctly that the Englishhad no vessels; nor is there much incidental mention of shipping betweenthe age of the settlement and that of Ælfred. The new-comers took uptheir abode at once on the richest parts of Roman Britain, and came intofull enjoyment of orchards which they had not planted and fields whichthey had not sown. The state of cultivation in which they found the valeof York and the Kentish glens must have been widely different from thatto which they were accustomed in their old heath-clad home. Accordingly, they settled down at once into farmers and landowners on a far largerscale than of yore; and they were not anxious to move away from the richlands which they had so easily acquired. From being sailors and graziersthey took to be agriculturists and landmen. In the towns, indeed, theydid not settle; and most of these continued to bear their old Roman orCeltic titles. A few may have been destroyed, especially in the firstonset, like Anderida, and, at a later date, Chester; but the greaternumber seem to have been still scantily inhabited, under Englishprotection, by a mixed urban population, mainly Celtic in blood, andknown by the name of Loegrians. It was in the country, however, that theEnglish conquerers took up their abode. They were tillers of the soil, not merchants or skippers, and it was long before they acquired a tastefor urban life. The whole eastern half of England is filled withvillages bearing the characteristic English clan names, and marking eachthe home of a distinct family of early settlers. As soon as thenew-comers had burnt the villa of the old Roman proprietor, and killed, driven out, or enslaved his abandoned serfs, they took the land tothemselves and divided it out on their national system. Hence the wholegovernment and social organisation of England is purely Teutonic, andthe country even lost its old name of Britain for its new one ofEngland. 

In England, as of old in Sleswick, the village community formed the unitof English society. Each such township was still bounded by its mark offorest, mere, or fen, which divided it from its nearest neighbours. Ineach lived a single clan, supposed to be of kindred blood and bearing acommon name. The marksmen and their serfs, the latter being conqueredWelshmen, cultivated the soil under cereals for bread, and also for anunnecessarily large supply of beer, as we learn at a later date fromnumerous charters. Cattle and horses grazed in the pastures, while largeherds of pigs were kept in the forest which formed the mark. Thus theearly English settled down at once from a nation of pirates into one ofagriculturists. Here and there, among the woods and fens which stillcovered a large part of the country, their little separate communitiesrose in small fenced clearings or on low islets, now joined by drainageto the mainland; while in the wider valleys, tilled in Roman times, thewealthier chieftains formed their settlements and allotted lands totheir Welsh tributaries. Many family names appear in different parts ofEngland, for a reason which will hereafter be explained. Thus we findthe Bassingas at Bassingbourn, in Cambridgeshire; at Bassingfield, inNotts; at Bassingham and Bassingthorpe, in Lincolnshire; and atBassington, in Northumberland. The Billings have left their stamp atBilling, in Northampton; Billingford, in Norfolk; Billingham, in Durham;Billingley, in Yorkshire; Billinghurst, in Sussex; and five other placesin various other counties. Birmingham, Nottingham, Wellington, Faringdon, Warrington, and Wallingford are well-known names formed onthe same analogy. How thickly these clan settlements lie scattered overTeutonic England may be judged from the number which occur in the Londondistrict alone–Kensington, Paddington, Notting-hill, Billingsgate, Islington, Newington, Kennington, Wapping, and Teddington. There arealtogether 1, 400 names of this type in England. Their value as a test ofTeutonic colonisation is shown by the fact that while 48 occur inNorthumberland, 127 in Yorkshire, 76 in Lincolnshire, 153 in Norfolk andSuffolk, 48 in Essex, 60 in Kent, and 86 in Sussex and Surrey, only 2are found in Cornwall, 6 in Cumberland, 24 in Devon, 13 in Worcester, 2in Westmoreland, and none in Monmouth. Speaking generally, these clannames are thickest along the original English coast, from Forth toPortland; they decrease rapidly as we move inland; and they die awayaltogether as we approach the purely Celtic west. 

The English families, however, probably tilled the soil by the aid ofWelsh slaves; indeed, in Anglo-Saxon, the word serf and Welshman areused almost interchangeably as equivalent synonyms. But though manyWelshmen were doubtless spared from the very first, nothing is morecertain than the fact that they became thoroughly Anglicized. A few newwords from Welsh or Latin were introduced into the English tongue, butthey were far too few sensibly to affect its vocabulary. The languagewas and still is essentially Low German; and though it now containsnumerous words of Latin or French origin, it does not and never didcontain any but the very smallest Celtic element. The slight number ofadditions made from the Welsh consisted chiefly of words connected withthe higher Roman civilisation–such as wall, street, and chester–or thenew methods of agriculture which the Teuton learnt from his morecivilised serfs. The Celt has always shown a great tendency to castaside his native language in Gaul, in Spain, and in Ireland; and theisolation of the English townships must have had the effect of greatlyaccelerating the process. Within a few generations the Celtic slave hadforgotten his tongue, his origin, and his religion, and had developedinto a pagan English serf. Whatever else the Teutonic conquest did, itturned every man within the English pale into a thorough Englishman. 

But the removal to Britain effected one immense change. "War begat theking. " In Sleswick the English had lived within their little marks asfree and independent communities. In Britain all the clans of eachcolony gradually came under the military command of a king. Theealdormen who led the various marauding bands assumed royal power in thenew country. Such a change was indeed inevitable. For not only had theEnglish to win the new England, but they had also to keep it and extendit. During four hundred years a constant smouldering warfare was carriedon between the foreigners and the native Welsh on their westernfrontier. Thus the townships of each colony entered into a closer unionwith one another for military purposes, and so arose the separatechieftainships or petty kingdoms of early England. But the king's powerwas originally very small. He was merely the semi-hereditary general andrepresentative of the people, of royal stock, but elected by the freesuffrages of the freemen. Only as the kingdoms coalesced, and as thepower of meeting became consequently less, did the king acquire hisgreater prerogatives. From the first, however, he seems to havepossessed the right of granting public lands, with the consent of thefreemen, to particular individuals; and such book-land, as the earlyEnglish called it, after the introduction of Roman writing, became theorigin of our system of private property in land. 

Every township had its moot or assembly of freemen, which met around thesacred oak, or on some holy hill, or beside the great stone monument ofsome forgotten Celtic chieftain. Every hundred also had its moot, andmany of these still survive in their original form to the present day, being held in the open air, near some sacred site or conspicuouslandmark. And the colony as a whole had also its moot, at which allfreemen might attend, and which settled the general affairs of thekingdom. At these last-named moots the kings were elected; and thoughthe selection was practically confined to men of royal kin, the kingnevertheless represented the free choice of the tribe. Before theconversion to Christianity, the royal families all traced their originto Woden. Thus the pedigree of Ida, King of Northumbria, runs asfollows:–"Ida was Eopping, Eoppa was Esing, Esa was Inguing, InguiAngenwiting, Angenwit Alocing, Aloc Benocing, Benoc Branding, BrandBaldæging, Bældæg Wodening. " But in later Christian times thechroniclers felt the necessity of reconciling these heathen genealogieswith the Scriptural account in Genesis; so they affiliated Woden himselfupon the Hebrew patriarchs. Thus the pedigree of the West Saxon kings, inserted in the Chronicle under the year 855, after conveying back thegenealogy of Æthelwulf to Woden, continues to say, "Woden wasFrealafing, Frealaf Finning, " and so on till it reaches "Sceafing, _idest filius Noe_; he was born in Noe's Ark. Lamech, Mathusalem, Enoc, Jared, Malalehel, Camon, Enos, Seth, Adam, _primus homo et paternoster_. "

The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Eastern and Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous heathen pirates. They massacred or enslavedthe civilised or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants with savageruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed the monuments of Roman occupation. They let the roads and cities fall into utter disrepair. They stampedout Christianity with fire and sword from end to end of their newdomain. They occupied a civilised and Christian land, and they restoredit to its primitive barbarism. Nor was there any improvement untilChristian teachers from Rome and Scotland once more introduced theforgotten culture which the English pirates had utterly destroyed. AsGildas phrases it, with true Celtic eloquence, the red tongue of flamelicked up the whole land from end to end, till it slaked its horridthirst in the western ocean. For 150 years the whole of English Britain, save, perhaps, Kent and London, was cut off from all intercourse withChristendom and the Roman world. The country consisted of several pettychieftainships, at constant feud with their Teutonic neighbours, andperpetually waging a border war with Welsh, Picts, and Scots. Withineach colony, much of the land remained untilled, while the clansettlements appeared like little islands of cultivation in the midst offorest, waste, and common. The villages were mere groups of woodenhomesteads, with barns and cattle-sheds, surrounded by rough stockades, and destitute of roads or communications. Even the palace of the kingwas a long wooden hall with numerous outhouses; for the English built nostone houses, and burnt down those of their Roman predecessors. Tradeseems to have been confined to the south coast, and few manufacturedarticles of any sort were in use. The English degraded their Celticserfs to their own barbaric level; and the very memory of Romancivilization almost died out of the land for a hundred and fifty years. 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR. 

From the little strip of eastern and southern coast on which they firstsettled, the English advanced slowly into the interior by the valleys ofthe great rivers, and finally swarmed across the central dividing ridgeinto the basins of the Severn and the Irish Sea. Up the open rivermouths they could make their way in their shallow-bottomed boats, as theScandinavian pirates did three centuries later; and when they reachedthe head of navigation in each stream for the small draught of theirlight vessels, they probably took to the land and settled down at once, leaving further inland expeditions to their sons and successors. Forthis second step in the Teutonic colonisation of Britain we have somefew traditional accounts, which seem somewhat more trustworthy thanthose of the first settlement. Unfortunately, however, they apply forthe most part only to the kingdom of Wessex, and not to the North andthe Midlands, where such details would be of far greater value. 

The valley of the Humber gives access to the great central basin of theTrent. Up this fruitful basin, at a somewhat later date, apparently, than the settlement of Deira and Lincolnshire, scattered bodies ofEnglish colonists, under petty leaders whose names have been forgotten, seem to have pushed their way forward through the broad lowlands towardsDerby, Nottingham, and Leicester. They bore the name of Middle English. Westward, again, other settlers raised their capital at Lichfield. Theseformed the advanced guard of the English against the Welsh, and hencetheir country was generally known as the Mark, or March, a name whichwas afterwards latinized into the familiar form of Mercia. The absenceof all tradition as to the colonisation of this important tract, theheart of England, and afterwards one of the three dominant Anglo-Saxonstates, leads one to suppose that the process was probably very gradual, and the change came about so slowly as to have left but little trace onthe popular memory. At any rate, it is certain that the central ridgelong formed the division between the two races; and that the Welsh atthis period still occupied the whole western watershed, except in thelower portion of the Severn valley. 

The Welland, the Nene, and the Great Ouse, flowing through the centre ofthe Fen Country, then a vast morass, studded with low and marshyislands, gave access to the districts about Peterborough, Stamford, andCambridge. Here, too, a body of unknown settlers, the Gyrwas, seem aboutthe same time to have planted their colonies. At a later date theycoalesced with the Mercians. However, the comparative scarcity ofvillages bearing the English clan names throughout all these regionssuggests the probability that Mercia, Middle England, and the FenCountry were not by any means so densely colonised as the coastdistricts; and independent Welsh communities long held out among theisolated dry tracts of the fens as robbers and outlaws. 

In the south, the advance of the West Saxons had been checked in 520, according to the legend, by the prowess of Arthur, king of theDevonshire Welsh. As Mr. Guest acutely notes, some special cause musthave been at work to make the Britons resist here so desperately as tomaintain for half a century a weak frontier within little more thantwenty miles of Winchester, the West Saxon capital. He suggests that thegreat choir of Ambrosius at Amesbury was probably the chief Christianmonastery of Britain, and that the Welshman may here have been fightingfor all that was most sacred to him on earth. Moreover, just behindstood the mysterious national monument of Stonehenge, the honoured tombof some Celtic or still earlier aboriginal chief. But in 552, theEnglish Chronicle tells us, Cynric, the West Saxon king, crossed thedowns behind Winchester, and descended upon the dale at Salisbury. TheRoman town occupied the square hill-fort of Old Sarum, and there Cynricput the Welsh to flight and took the stronghold by storm. 

The road was thus opened in the rear to the upper waters of the Thames(impassable before because of the Roman population of London), as wellas towards the valley of the Bath Avon. Four years later Cynric and hisson Ceawlin once more advanced as far as Barbury hill-fort, probably ona mere plundering raid. But in 571 Cuthwulf, brother of Ceawlin, againmarched northward, and "fought against the Welsh at Bedford, and tookfour towns, Lenbury (or Leighton Buzzard), Aylesbury, Bensington (nearDorchester in Oxfordshire), and Ensham. " Thus the West Saxons overranthe whole upper valley of the Thames from Berkshire to above Oxford, andformed a junction with the Middle Saxons to the north of London; whileeastward they spread as far as the northern boundaries of Essex. In 577the same intruders made a still more important move. Crossing thecentral watershed of England, near Chippenham, they descended upon thebroken valley of the Bath Avon, and found themselves the firstEnglishmen who reached any of the basins which point westward towardsthe Atlantic seaboard. At a doubtful place named Deorham (probablyDyrham near Bath), "Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Welsh, andslew three kings, Conmail, and Condidan, and Farinmail, and took threetowns from them, Gloucester, and Cirencester, and Bath. " Thus the threegreat Roman cities of the lower Severn valley fell into the hands of theWest Saxons, and the English for the first time stood face to face withthe western sea. Though the story of these conquests is of courserecorded from mere tradition at a much later date, it still has a ringof truth, or at least of probability, about it, which is wholly wantingto the earlier legends. If we are not certain as to the facts, we can atleast accept them as symbolical of the manner in which the West Saxonpower wormed its way over the upper basin of the Thames, and creptgradually along the southern valley of the Severn. 

The victory of Deorham has a deeper importance of its own, however, thanthe mere capture of the three great Roman cities in the south-west ofBritain. By the conquest of Bath and Gloucester, the West Saxons cut offthe Welsh of Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset from their brethren in theMidlands and in Wales. This isolation of the West Welsh, as the Englishthenceforth called them, largely broke the power of the nativeresistance. Step by step in the succeeding age the West Saxons advancedby hard fighting, but with no serious difficulty, to the Axe, to theParret, to the Tone, to the Exe, to the Tamar, till at last the WestWelsh, confined to the peninsula of Cornwall, became known merely as theCornish men, and in the reign of Æthelstan were finally subjugated bythe English, though still retaining their own language and nationalexistence. But in all the western regions the Celtic population wascertainly spared to a far greater extent than in the east; and theposition of the English might rather be described as an occupation thanas a settlement in the strict sense of the word. 

The westward progress of the Northumbrians is later and much morehistorical. Theodoric, son of Ida, as we may perhaps infer from the oldWelsh ballads, fought long and not always successfully with Urien ofStrathclyde. But in 592, says Bæda, who lived himself but three-quartersof a century later than the event he describes, "there reigned over thekingdom of the Northumbrians a most brave and ambitious king, Æthelfrith, who, more than all other nobles of the English, wasted therace of the Britons; for no one of our kings, no one of our chieftains, has rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral partof the English territories, whether by subjugating or expatriating thenatives. " In 606 Æthelfrith rounded the Peakland, now known asDerbyshire, and marched from the upper Trent upon the Roman city ofChester. There "he made a terrible slaughter of the perfidious race. "Over two thousand Welsh monks from the monastery of Bangor Iscoed wereslain by the heathen invader; but Bæda explains that Æthelfrith put themto death because they prayed against him; a sentence which stronglysuggests the idea that the English did not usually kill non-combatantWelshmen. 

The victory of Chester divided the Welsh power in the north as that ofDeorham had divided it in the south. Henceforward, the Northumbriansbore rule from sea to sea, from the mouth of the Humber to the mouths ofthe Mersey and the Dee. Æthelfrith even kept up a rude navy in the IrishSea. Thus the Welsh nationality was broken up into three separate andweak divisions–Strathclyde in the north, Wales in the centre, andDamnonia, or Cornwall, in the south. Against these three fragments theEnglish presented an unbroken and aggressive front, Northumbria standingover against Strathclyde, Mercia steadily pushing its way along theupper valley of the Severn against North Wales, and Wessex advancing inthe south against South Wales and the West Welsh of Somerset, Devon, andCornwall. Thus the conquest of the interior was practically complete. There still remained, it is true, the subjugation of the west; but thewest was brought under the English over-lordship by slow degrees, and ina very different manner from the east and the south coast, or even thecentral belt. Cornwall finally yielded under Æthelstan; Strathclyde wasgradually absorbed by the English in the south and the Scottish kingdomon the north; and the last remnant of Wales only succumbed to theintruders under the rule of the Angevin Edward I. 

There were, in fact, three epochs of English extension in Britain. Thefirst epoch was one of colonisation on the coasts and along the valleysof the eastward rivers. The second epoch was one of conquest and partialsettlement in the central plateau and the westward basins. The thirdepoch was one of merely political subjugation in the western mountainregions. The proofs of these assertions we must examine at length in thesucceeding chapter. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 

It has been usual to represent the English conquest of South-easternBritain as an absolute change of race throughout the greater part of ourisland. The Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly believed, came to England andthe Lowlands of Scotland in overpowering numbers, and actuallyexterminated or drove into the rugged west the native Celts. Thepopulation of the whole country south of Forth and Clyde is supposed tobe now, and to have been ever since the conquest, purely Teutonic orScandinavian in blood, save only in Wales, Cornwall, and, perhaps, Cumberland and Galloway. But of late years this belief has met withstrenuous opposition from several able scholars; and though many of ourgreatest historians still uphold the Teutonic theory, with certainmodifications and admissions, there are, nevertheless, good reasonswhich may lead us to believe that a large proportion of the Celts werespared as tillers of the soil, and that Celtic blood may yet be foundabundantly even in the most Teutonic portions of England. 

In the first place, it must be remembered that, by common consent, onlythe east and south coasts and the country as far as the centraldividing ridge can be accounted as to any overwhelming extent English inblood. It is admitted that the population of the Scottish Highlands, ofWales, and of Cornwall is certainly Celtic. It is also admitted thatthere exists a large mixed population of Celts and Teutons inStrathclyde and Cumbria, in Lancashire, in the Severn Valley, in Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. The northern and western half of Britain isacknowledged to be mainly Celtic. Thus the question really narrowsitself down to the ethnical peculiarities of the south and east. 

Here, the surest evidence is that of anthropology. We know that the pureAnglo-Saxons were a round-skulled, fair-haired, light-eyed, blonde-complexioned race; and we know that wherever (if anywhere) wefind unmixed Germanic races at the present day, High Dutch, Low Dutch, or Scandinavian, we always meet with some of these same personalpeculiarities in almost every individual of the community. But we alsoknow that the Celts, originally themselves a similar blonde Aryan race, mixed largely in Britain with one or more long-skulled dark-haired, black-eyed, and brown-complexioned races, generally identified with theBasques or Euskarians, and with the Ligurians. The nation which resultedfrom this mixture showed traces of both types, being sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette; sometimes black-haired, sometimes red-haired, andsometimes yellow-haired. Individuals of all these types are still foundin the undoubtedly Celtic portions of Britain, though the dark typethere unquestionably preponderates so far as numbers are concerned. Itis this mixed race of fair and dark people, of Aryan Celts withnon-Aryan Euskarians or Ligurians, which we usually describe as Celticin modern Britain, by contradistinction to the later wave of TeutonicEnglish. 

Now, according to the evidence of the early historians, as interpretedby Mr. Freeman and other authors (whose arguments we shall presentlyexamine), the English settlers in the greater part of South Britainalmost entirely exterminated the Celtic population. But if this be so, how comes it that at the present day a large proportion of our people, even in the east, belong to the dark and long-skulled type? The fact isthat upon this subject the historians are largely at variance with theanthropologists; and as the historical evidence is weak and inferential, while the anthropological evidence is strong and direct, there can bevery little doubt which we ought to accept. Professor Huxley [Essay "Onsome Fixed Points in British Ethnography, "] has shown that themelanochroic or dark type of Englishmen is identical in the shape of theskull, the anatomical peculiarities, and the colour of skin, hair, andeyes with that of the continent, which is undeniably Celtic in the widersense–that is to say, belonging to the primitive non-Teutonic race, which spoke a Celtic language, and was composed of mixed Celtic, Iberian, and Ligurian elements. Professor Phillips points out that inYorkshire, and especially in the plain of York, an essentially dark, short, non-Teutonic type is common; while persons of the samecharacteristics abound among the supposed pure Anglians ofLincolnshire. They are found in great numbers in East Anglia, and theyare not rare even in Kent. In Sussex and Essex they occur lessfrequently, and they are also comparatively scarce in the Lothians. Dr. Beddoe, Dr. Thurnam, and other anthropologists have collected muchevidence to the same effect. Hence we may conclude with greatprobability that large numbers of the descendants of the dark Britonsstill survive even on the Teutonic coast. As to the descendants of thelight Britons, we cannot, of course, separate them from those of thelike-complexioned English invaders. But in truth, even in the eastitself, save only perhaps in Sussex and Essex, the dark and fair typeshave long since so largely coalesced by marriage that there are probablyfew or no real Teutons or real Celts individually distinguishable atall. Absolutely fair people, of the Scandinavian or true German sort, with very light hair and very pale blue eyes, are almost unknown amongus; and when they do occur, they occur side by side with relations ofevery other shade. As a rule, our people vary infinitely in complexionand anatomical type, from the quite squat, long-headed, swarthy peasantswhom we sometimes meet with in rural Yorkshire, to the tall, flaxen-haired, red-cheeked men whom we occasionally find not only inDanish Derbyshire, but even in mainly Celtic Wales and Cornwall. As tothe west, Professor Huxley declares, on purely anthropological grounds, that it is probably, on the whole, more deeply Celtic than Irelanditself. 

These anthropological opinions are fully borne out by those scientificarchæologists who have done most in the way of exploring the tombs andother remains of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders. Professor Rolleston, who has probably examined more skulls of this period than any otherinvestigator, sums up his consideration of those obtained fromRomano-British and Anglo-Saxon interments by saying, "I should beinclined to think that wholesale massacres of the conqueredRomano-Britons were rare, and that wholesale importations of Anglo-Saxonwomen were not much more frequent. " He points out that "we haveanatomical evidence for saying that two or more distinct varieties ofmen existed in England both previously to and during the period of theTeutonic invasion and domination. " The interments show us that the raceswhich inhabited Britain before the English conquest continued in part toinhabit it after that conquest. The dolichocephali, or long-skulled typeof men, who, in part, preceded the English, "have been found abundantlyin the Suffolk region of the Littus Saxonicum, where the Celt and Saxon[Englishman] are not known to have met as enemies when East Angliabecame a kingdom. " Thus we see that just where people of the dark typeoccur abundantly at the present day, skulls of the corresponding sortare met with abundantly in interments of the Anglo-Saxon period. Similarly, Mr. Akerman, after explorations in tombs, observes, "Thetotal expulsion or extinction of the Romano-British population by theinvaders will scarcely be insisted upon in this age of enquiry. " Nay, even in Teutonic Kent, Jute and Briton still lie side by side in thesame sepulchres. Most modern Englishmen have somewhat long rather thanround skulls. The evidence of archæology supports the evidence ofanthropology in favour of the belief that some, at least, of the nativeBritons were spared by the invading host. 

On the other hand, against these unequivocal testimonies of modernresearch we have to set the testimony of the early historicalauthorities, on which the Teutonic theory mainly relies. The authoritiesin question are three, Gildas, Bæda, and the English Chronicle. Gildaswas, or professes to be, a British monk, who wrote in the very midst ofthe English conquest, when the invaders were still confined, for themost part, to the south-eastern region. Objections have been raised tothe authenticity of his work, a small rhetorical Latin pamphlet, entitled, "The History of the Britons;" but these objections have, perhaps, been set at rest for many minds by Dr. Guest and Mr. Green. Nevertheless, what little Gildas has to tell us is of slight historicalimportance. His book is a disappointing Jeremiad, couched in the floridand inflated Latin rhetoric so common during the decadence of the Romanempire, intermingled with a strong flavour of hyperbolical Celticimagination; and it teaches us practically nothing as to the state ofthe conquered districts. It is wholly occupied with fierce diatribesagainst the Saxons, and complaints as to the weakness, wickedness, andapathy of the British chieftains. It says little that can throw anylight on the question as to whether the Welsh were largely spared, though it abounds with wild and vague declamation about theextermination of the natives. Even Gildas, however, mentions that someof his countrymen, "constrained by famine, came and yielded themselvesup to their enemies as slaves for ever;" while others, "committing thesafeguard of their lives to mountains, crags, thick forests, and rockyisles, though with trembling hearts, remained in their fatherland. "These passages certainly suggest that a Welsh remnant survived in twoways within the English pale, first as slaves, and secondly as isolatedoutlaws. 

Bæda stands on a very different footing. His authenticity is undoubted;his language is simple and straightforward. He was born in or about theyear 672, only two hundred years after the landing of the first Englishcolonists in Thanet. Scarcely more than a century separated him from thedays of Ida. The constant lingering warfare with the Welsh on thewestern frontier was still for him a living fact. The Celt still heldhalf of Britain. At the date of his birth the northern Welsh stillretained their independence in Strathclyde; the Welsh proper stillspread to the banks of the Severn; and the West Welsh of Cornwall stillowned all the peninsula south of the Bristol Channel as far eastward asthe Somersetshire marshes. Beyond Forth and Clyde, the Picts yet ruledover the greater part of the Highlands, while the Scots, who have nowgiven the name of Scotland to the whole of Britain beyond the Cheviots, were a mere intrusive Irish colony in Argyllshire and the Western Isles. He lived, in short, at the very period when Britain was still in theact of becoming England; and no historical doubts of any sort hang overthe authenticity of his great work, "The Ecclesiastical History of theEnglish people. " But Bæda unfortunately knows little more about thefirst settlement than he could learn from Gildas, whom he quotes almost_verbatim_. He tells us, however, nothing of extermination of the Welsh. "Some, " he says, "were slaughtered; some gave themselves up to undergoslavery: some retreated beyond the sea: and some, remaining in their ownland, lived a miserable life in the mountains and forests. " In all this, he is merely transcribing Gildas, but he saw no improbability in thewords. At a later date, Æthelfrith, of Northumbria, he tells us, "rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral part ofthe English territory, whether by subjugating or expatriating[1] thenatives, " than any previous king. Eadwine, before his conversion, "subdued to the empire of the English the Mevanian islands, " Man andAnglesey; but we know that the population of both islands is stillmainly Celtic in blood and speech. These examples sufficiently show us, that even before the introduction of Christianity, the English did notalways utterly destroy the Welsh inhabitants of conquered districts. Andit is universally admitted that, after their conversion, they foughtwith the Welsh in a milder manner, sparing their lives asfellow-Christians, and permitting them to retain their lands astributary proprietors. 

 [1] The word in the original is _exterminatis_, but of course _exterminare_ then bore its etymological sense of expatriation or expulsion, if not merely of confiscation, while it certainly did not imply the idea of slaughter, connoted by the modern word. 

The English Chronicle, our third authority, was first compiled at thecourt of Ælfred, four and a-half centuries after the Conquest; and soits value as original testimony is very slight. Its earlier portions aremainly condensed from Bæda; but it contains a few fragments oftraditional information from some other unknown sources. Thesefragments, however, refer chiefly to Kent, Sussex, and the older partsof Wessex, where we have reason to believe that the Teutoniccolonisation was exceptionally thorough; and they tell us nothing aboutYorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia, where we find at the presentday so large a proportion of the population possessing an unmistakablyCeltic physique. The Chronicle undoubtedly describes the conflict in thesouth as sharp and bloody; and in spite of the mythical character of thenames and events, it is probable that in this respect it rightlypreserves the popular memory of the conquest, and its general nature. InKent, "the Welsh fled the English like fire;" and Hengest and Æsc, in asingle battle, slew 4, 000 men. In Sussex, Ælle and Cissa killed or droveout the natives in the western rapes on their first landing, andafterwards massacred every Briton at Anderida. In Wessex, in the firststruggle, "Cerdic and Cynric offslew a British king whose name wasNatanleod, and 5, 000 men with him. " And so the dismal annals of rapineand slaughter run on from year to year, with simple, unquestioningconciseness, showing us, at least, the manner in which the laterEnglish believed their forefathers had acquired the land. Moreover, these frightful details accord well enough with the vague generalitiesof Gildas, from which, however, they may very possibly have beenmanufactured. Yet even the Chronicle nowhere speaks of absoluteextermination: that idea has been wholly read into its words, notdirectly inferred from them. A great deal has been made of the massacreat Pevensey; but we hear nothing of similar massacres at the great Romancities–at London, at York, at Verulam, at Bath, at Cirencester, whichwould surely have attracted more attention than a small outlyingfortress like Anderida. Even the Teutonic champions themselves admitthat some, at least, of the Celts were incorporated into the Englishcommunity. "The women, " says Mr. Freeman, "would, doubtless, be largelyspared;" while as to the men, he observes, "we may be sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which thevanquished found at the hands of our fathers. " But there is a vast gulf, from the ethnological point of view, between exterminating a nation andenslaving it. [2]

 [2] In this and a few other cases, modern authorities are quoted merely to show that the essential facts of a large Welsh survival are really admitted even by those who most strongly argue in favour of the general Teutonic origin of Englishmen. 

In the cities, indeed, it would seem that the Britons remained in greatnumbers. The Welsh bards complain that the urban race of Romanisednatives known as Loegrians, "became as Saxons. " Mr. Kemble has shownthat the English did not by any means always massacre the inhabitants ofthe cities. Mr. Freeman observes, "It is probable that within the[English] frontier there still were Roman towns tributary to theconquerors rather than occupied by them;" and Canon Stubbs himselfremarks, that "in some of the cities there were probably elements ofcontinuous life: London, the mart of the merchants, York, the capital ofthe north, and some others, have a continuous political existence. ""Wherever the cities were spared, " he adds, "a portion, at least, of thecity population must have continued also. In the country, too, especially towards the west and the debateable border, great numbers ofBritons may have survived in a servile or half-servile condition. " Butwe must remember that in only two cases, Anderida and Chester, do weactually hear of massacres; in all the other towns, Bæda and theChronicle tell us nothing about them. It is a significant fact thatSussex, the one kingdom in which we hear of a complete annihilation, isthe very one where the Teutonic type of physique still remains thepurest. But there are nowhere any traces of English clan nomenclature inany of the cities. They all retain their Celtic or Roman names. AtCambridge itself, in the heart of the true English country, the charterof the thegn's guild, a late document, mentions a special distinction ofpenalties for killing a Welshman, "if the slain be a ceorl, 2 ores, ifhe be a Welshman, one ore. " "The large Romanised towns, " says ProfessorRolleston, "no doubt made terms with the Saxons, who abhorred citylife, and would probably be content to leave the unwarlike burghers in acondition of heavily-taxed submissiveness. "

Thus, even in the east it is admitted that a Celtic element probablyentered into the population in three ways, –by sparing the women, bymaking rural slaves of the men, and by preserving some, at least, of theinhabitants of cities. The skulls of these Anglicised Welshmen are foundin ancient interments; their descendants are still to be recognised bytheir physical type in modern England. "It is quite possible, " says Mr. Freeman, "that even at the end of the sixth century there may have beenwithin the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies ofWelshmen still retained a precarious independence. " Sir F. Palgrave hascollected passages tending to show that parties of independent Welshmenheld out in the Fens till a very late period; and this conclusion isadmitted by Mr. Freeman to be probably correct. But more important isthe general survival of scattered Britons within the English communitiesthemselves. Traces of this we find even in Anglo-Saxon documents. Thesignatures to very early charters, [3] collected by Thorpe and Kemble, supply us with names some of which are assuredly not Teutonic, whileothers are demonstrably Celtic; and these names are borne by peopleoccupying high positions at the court of English kings. Names of thisclass occur even in Kent itself; while others are borne by members ofthe royal family of Wessex. The local dialect of the West Riding ofYorkshire still contains many Celtic words; and the shepherds ofNorthumberland and the Lothians still reckon their sheep by what isknown as "the rhyming score, " which is really a corrupt form of theWelsh numerals from one to twenty. The laws of Northumbria mention theWelshmen who pay rent to the king. Indeed, it is clear that even in theeast itself the English were from the first a body of rural colonistsand landowners, holding in subjection a class of native serfs, with whomthey did not intermingle, but who gradually became Anglicised, andfinally coalesced with their former masters, under the stress of theDanish and Norman supremacies. 

 [3] Kemble "On Anglo-Saxon Names. " Proc. Arch. Inst. , 1845. 

In the west, however, the English occupation took even less the form ofa regular colonisation. The laws of Ine, a West Saxon king, show us thatin his territories, bordering on yet unconquered British lands, theWelshman often occupied the position of a rent-paying inferior, as wellas that of a slave. The so-called Nennius tells us that Elmet inYorkshire, long an intrusive Welsh principality, was not subdued by theEnglish till the reign of Eadwine of Northumbria; when, we learn, theNorthumbrian prince "seized Elmet, and expelled Cerdic its king:" butnothing is said as to any extermination of its people. As Bædaincidentally mentions this Cerdic, "king of the Britons, " Nennius mayprobably be trusted upon the point. As late as the beginning of thetenth century, King Ælfred in his will describes the people of Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Wilts, as "Welsh kin. " The physical appearance ofthe peasantry in the Severn valley, and especially in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire, indicates that thewestern parts of Mercia were equally Celtic in blood. The dialect ofLancashire contains a large Celtic infusion. Similarly, the Englishclan-villages decrease gradually in numbers as we move westward, tillthey almost disappear beyond the central dividing ridge. We learn fromDomesday Book that at the date of the Norman conquest the number ofserfs was greater from east to west, and largest on the Welsh border. Mr. Isaac Taylor points out that a similar argument may be derived fromthe area of the hundreds in various counties. The hundred was originallya body of one hundred English families (more or less), bound together bymutual pledge, and answerable for one another's conduct. In Sussex, theaverage number of square miles in each hundred is only twenty-three; inKent, twenty-four; in Surrey, fifty-eight; and in Herts, seventy-nine:but in Gloucester it is ninety-seven; in Derby, one hundred andsixty-two; in Warwick, one hundred and seventy-nine; and in Lancashire, three hundred and two. These facts imply that the English populationclustered thickest in the old settled east, but grew thinner and thinnertowards the Welsh and Cumbrian border. Altogether, the historicalevidence regarding the western slopes of England bears out ProfessorHuxley's dictum as to the thoroughly Celtic character of theirpopulation. 

On the other hand, it is impossible to deny that Mr. Freeman and CanonStubbs have proved their point as to the thorough Teutonisation ofSouthern Britain by the English invaders. Though it may be true thatmuch Welsh blood survived in England, especially amongst the servileclass, yet it is none the less true that the nation which rose upon theruins of Roman Britain was, in form and organisation, almost purelyEnglish. The language spoken by the whole country was the same which hadbeen spoken in Sleswick. Only a few words of Welsh origin relating toagriculture, household service, and smithcraft, were introduced by theserfs into the tongue of their masters. The dialects of the Yorkshiremoors, of the Lake District, and of Dorset or Devon, spoken only by wildherdsmen in the least cultivated tracts, retained a few more evidenttraces of the Welsh vocabulary: but in York, in London, in Winchester, and in all the large towns, the pure Anglo-Saxon of the old England bythe shores of the Baltic was alone spoken. The Celtic serfs and theirdescendants quickly assumed English names, talked English to oneanother, and soon forgot, in a few generations, that they had not alwaysbeen Englishmen in blood and tongue. The whole organisation of thestate, the whole social life of the people, was entirely Teutonic. "Thehistorical civilisation, " as Canon Stubbs admirably puts it, "is Englishand not Celtic. " Though there may have been much Welsh blood left, itran in the veins of serfs and rent-paying churls, who were of nopolitical or social importance. These two aspects of the case should bekept carefully distinct. Had they always been separated, much of thediscussion which has arisen on the subject would doubtless have beenavoided; for the strongest advocates of the Teutonic theory aregenerally ready to allow that Celtic women, children, and slaves mayhave been largely spared: while the Celtic enthusiasts have thoughtincumbent upon them to derive English words from Welsh roots, and totrace the origin of English social institutions to Celtic models. Thefacts seem to indicate that while the modern English nation is largelyWelsh in blood, it is wholly Teutonic in form and language. Each of usprobably traces back his descent to mixed Celtic and Germanic ancestry:but while the Celts have contributed the material alone, the Teutonshave contributed both the material and the form. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

HEATHEN ENGLAND. 

We can now picture to ourselves the general aspect of the country afterthe English colonies had established themselves as far west as theSomersetshire marshes, the Severn, and the Dee. The whole land wasoccupied by little groups of Teutonic settlers, each isolated by themark within their own township; each tilling the ground with their ownhands and those of their Welsh serfs. The townships were rudely gatheredtogether into petty chieftainships; and these chieftainships tendedgradually to aggregate into larger kingdoms, which finally merged in thethree great historical divisions of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex;divisions that survive to our own time as the North, the Midlands, andthe South. Meanwhile, most of the Roman towns were slowly depopulatedand fell into disrepair, so that a "waste chester" becomes a commonobject in Anglo-Saxon history. Towns belong to a higher civilisation, and had little place in agricultural England. The roads were neglectedfor want of commerce; and trade only survived in London and along thecoast of Kent, where the discovery of Frankish coins proves theexistence of intercourse with the Teutonic kingdom of Neustria, whichhad grown up on the ruins of northern Gaul. Everywhere in Britain theRoman civilisation fell into abeyance: in improved agriculture alone didany notable relic of its existence remain. The century and a halfbetween the conquest and the arrival of Augustine is a dreary period ofunmixed barbarism and perpetual anarchy. 

From time to time the older settled colonies kept sending out freshswarms of young emigrants towards the yet unconquered west, much as theAmericans and Canadians have done in our own days. Armed with their longswords and battle-axes, the new colonists went forth in family bands, under petty chieftains, to war against the Welsh; and when they hadconquered themselves a district, they settled on it as lords of thesoil, enslaved the survivors of their enemies, and made their leaderinto a king. Meanwhile, the older colonies kept up their fighting spiritby constant wars amongst themselves. Thus we read of contests betweenthe men of Kent and the West Saxons, or between conflicting nobles inWessex itself. Fighting, in fact, was the one business of the Englishfreeman, and it was but slowly that he settled down into a quietagriculturist. The influence of Christianity alone seems to have wroughtthe change. Before the conversion of England, all the glimpses which weget of the English freeman represent him only as a rude and turbulentwarrior, with the very spirit of his kinsmen, the later wickings of thenorth. 

An enormous amount of the country still remained overgrown with wildforest. The whole weald of Kent and Sussex, the great tract of Selwoodin Wessex, the larger part of Warwickshire, the entire Peakland, thecentral dividing ridge between the two seas from Yorkshire to the Forth, and other wide regions elsewhere, were covered with primæval woodlands. Arden, Charnwood, Wychwood, Sherwood, and the rest, are but the relicsof vast forests which once stretched over half England. The bear stilllurked in the remotest thickets; packs of wolves still issued forth atnight to ravage the herdsman's folds; wild boars wallowed in the fens ormunched acorns under the oakwoods; deer ranged over all the heathytracts throughout the whole island; and the wild white cattle, nowconfined to Chillingham Park, roamed in many spots from north to south. Hence hunting was the chief pastime of the princes and ealdormen whenthey were not engaged in war with one another or with the Welsh. Game, boar-flesh, and venison formed an important portion of diet throughoutthe whole early English period, up to the Norman conquest, and longafter. 

The king was the recognised head of each community, though his positionwas hardly more than that of leader of the nobles in war. He received anoriginal lot in the conquered land, and remained a private possessor ofestates, tilled by his Welsh slaves. He was king of the people, not ofthe country, and is always so described in the early monuments. Eachking seems to have had a chief priest in his kingdom. 

There was no distinct capital for the petty kingdoms, though a principalroyal residence appears to have been usual. But the kings possessed manyseparate _hams_ or estates in their domain, in each of which food andother material for their use were collected by their serfs. They movedabout with their suite from one of these to another, consuming all thathad been prepared for them in each, and then passing on to the next. Theking himself made the journey in the waggon drawn by oxen, which formedhis rude prerogative. Such primitive royal progresses were absolutelynecessary in so disjointed a state of society, if the king was to governat all. Only by moving about and seeing with his own eyes could he gainany information in a country where organisation was feeble and writingpractically unknown: only by consuming what was grown for him on thespot where it was grown could he and his suite obtain provisions in therude state of Anglo-Saxon communications. But such government as existedwas mainly that of the local ealdormen and the village gentry. 

Marriages were practically conducted by purchase, the wife being boughtby the husband from her father's family. A relic of this custom perhapsstill survives in the modern ceremony, when the father gives the bridein marriage to the bridegroom. Polygamy was not unknown; and it wasusual for men to marry their father's widows. The wives, being part ofthe father's property, naturally became part of the son's heritage. Fathers probably possessed the right of selling their children intoslavery; and we know that English slaves were sold at Rome, beingconveyed thither by Frisian merchants. 

The artizan class, such as it was, must have been attached to the housesof the chieftains, probably in a servile position. Pottery wasmanufactured of excellent but simple patterns. Metal work was, ofcourse, thoroughly understood, and the Anglo-Saxon swords and knivesdiscovered in barrows are of good construction. Every chief had also hisminstrel, who sang the short and jerky Anglo-Saxon songs to theaccompaniment of a harp. The dead were burnt and their ashes placed intumuli in the north: the southern tribes buried their warriors in fullmilitary dress, and from their tombs much of the little knowledge whichwe possess as to their habits is derived. Thence have been taken theirswords, a yard long, with ornamental hilt and double-cutting edge, oftencovered by runic inscriptions; their small girdle knives; their longspears; and their round, leather-faced, wooden shields. The jewellery isof gold, enriched with coloured enamel, pearl, or sliced garnet. Buckles, rings, bracelets, hairpins, necklaces, scissors, and toiletrequisites were also buried with the dead. Glass drinking-cups whichoccur amongst the tombs, were probably imported from the continent toKent or London; and some small trade certainly existed with the Romanworld, as we learn from Bæda. 

In faith the English remained true to their old Teutonic myths. Theirintercourse with the Christian Welsh was not of a kind to make themembrace the religion which must have seemed to them that of slaves andenemies. Bæda tells us that the English worshipped idols, and sacrificedoxen to their gods. Many traces of their mythology are still left in ourmidst. 

First in importance among their deities came Woden, the Odin of ourScandinavian kinsmen, whose name we still preserve in Wednesday (diesMercurii). To him every royal family of the English traced its descent. Mr. Kemble has pointed out many high places in England which keep hisname to the present day. Wanborough, in Surrey, at theheaven-water-parting of the Hog's Back, was originally Wodnesbeorh, orthe hill of Woden. Wanborough, in Wiltshire, which divides the valleysof the Kennet and the Isis, has the same origin; as has alsoWoodnesborough in Kent. Wonston, in Hants, was probably Woden's stone;Wambrook, Wampool, and Wansford, his brook, his pool, and his ford. Allthese names are redolent of that nature-worship which was so marked aportion of the Anglo-Saxon religion. Godshill, in the Isle of Wight, nowcrowned by a Christian church, was also probably the site of early Wodenworship. The boundaries of estates, as mentioned in charters, giveinstances of trees, stones, and posts, used as landmarks, and dedicatedto Woden, thus conferring upon them a religious sanction, like that ofHermes amongst the Greeks. Anglo-Saxon worship generally gathered aroundnatural features; and sacred oaks, ashes, wells, hills, and rivers areamong the commonest memorials of our heathen ancestors. Many of themwere reconsecrated after the introduction of Christianity to saints ofthe church, and so have retained their character for sanctity almost toour own time. 

Thunor, the same word as our modern English thunder, was practically, though not philologically, the Anglo-Saxon representative of Zeus. Weare more familiar with his name in its clipped Norse form of Thor. Thursday is Thunor's day (Thunres dæg: dies Jovis) and the thunderbolt, really a polished stone axe of the aboriginal neolithic savages, wassupposed to be his weapon. Thundersfield, in Surrey; Thundersley, inEssex; and Thursley, in Surrey, still preserve the memory of his sacredsites. Thurleigh, in Bedford; Thurlow, in Essex; Thursley, inCumberland; Thursfield, in Staffordshire; and Thursford, in Norfolk, aremore probably due to later Danish influence, and commemorate namesakesof the Norse Thor rather than the English Thunor. 

Tiw, the philological equivalent of Zeus, answered rather in characterto Ares, and had for his day Tuesday (dies Martis). Tiw's mere and Tiw'sthorn occur in charters, and a few places still retain his name. Freagives his title to Friday (dies Veneris), and Sætere to Saturday (diesSaturni). But the Anglo-Saxon worship really paid more attention tocertain deified heroes, –Bældæg, Geat, and Sceaf; and to certainpersonified abstractions, –Wig (war), Death, and Sige (victory), than tothese minor gods. And, as often happens in Polytheistic religions, thereis reason to believe that the popular creed had much less reference tothe gods at all than to many inferior spirits of a naturalistic sort. For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritualbeings, half divine, half devilish. Fiends and monsters peopled thefens, and tales of their doings terrified his childhood. Spirits offlood and fell swamped his boat or misled him at night. Water nicorshaunted the streams; fairies danced on the green rings of the pasture;dwarfs lived in the barrows of Celtic or neolithic chieftains, andwrought strange weapons underground. The mark, the forest, the hills, were all full for the early Englishman of mysterious and often hostilebeings. At length the Weirds or Fates swept him away. Beneath the earthitself, Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at lastreceived him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior's death, he wasadmitted to the happy realms of Wælheal. As a whole, the Anglo-Saxonheathendom was a religion of terrorism. Evil spirits surrounded men onevery side, dwelt in all solitary places, and stalked over the land bynight. Ghosts dwelt in the forest; elves haunted the rude stone circlesof elder days. The woodland, still really tenanted by deer, wolves, andwild boars, was also filled by popular imagination with demons and imps. Charms, spells, and incantations formed the most real and living part ofthe national faith; and many of these survived into Christian times aswitchcraft. Some of them, and of the early myths, even continue to berepeated in the folk-lore of the present day. Such are the legends ofthe Wild Huntsman and of Wayland Smith. Indeed, heathendom had a stronghold over the common English mind long after the public adoption ofChristianity; and heathen sacrifices continued to be offered in secretas late as the thirteenth century. Our poetry and our ordinary languageis tinged with heathen ideas even in modern times. 

Still more interesting, however, are those relics of yet earlier socialstates, which we find amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Theproduction of fire by rubbing together two sticks is a common practiceamongst all savages; and it has acquired a sacred significance whichcauses it to live on into more civilised stages. Once a year theneedfire was so lighted, and all the hearths of the village wererekindled from the blaze thus obtained. Cattle were "passed through thefire" to preserve them from the attacks of fiends; and perhaps evenchildren were sometimes treated in the same manner. The ceremony, originally adopted, perhaps, by the English from their Celtic serfs, still lingers in remote parts of the country, as the lighting of fireson St. John's Eve. Tattooing the face was practised by the nobleclasses. It seems probable that the early English sacrificed humanvictims, as the Germans certainly did to Wuotan (the High Dutch Woden);and we know that the practice of suttee existed, and that widows slewthemselves on the death of their husbands, in order to accompany them tothe other world. Even more curious are the vestiges of Totemism, orprimitive animal worship, common to all branches of the Aryan race, aswell as to the North American Indians, the Australian black fellows, andmany other savages. Totemism consists in the belief that each family isliterally descended from a particular plant or animal, whose name itbears; and members of the family generally refuse to pluck the plant orkill the animal after which they are named. Of these beliefs we findapparently several traces in Anglo-Saxon life. The genealogies of thekings include such names as those of the horse, the mare, the ash, andthe whale. In the very early Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, two of thecharacters bear the names of Wulf and Eofer (boar). The wolf and theraven were sacred animals, and have left their memory in many places, aswell as in such personal titles as Æthelwulf, the noble wolf. The boarwas also greatly reverenced; its head was used as an amulet, or as acrest for helmets, and oaths were taken upon it till late in the middleages. Our own boar's head at Christmas is a relic of the old belief. Thesanctity of the horse and the ash has been already mentioned. Now manyof the Anglo-Saxon clans bore names implying their descent from suchplants or animals. Thus a charter mentions the Æscings, or sons of theash, in Surrey; another refers to the Earnings, or sons of the eagle(earn); a third to the Heartings, or sons of the hart; a fourth to theWylfings, or sons of the wolf; and a fifth to the Thornings, or sons ofthe thorn. The oak has left traces of his descendants at Oakington, inCambridge: the birch, at Birchington, in Kent; the boar (Eofer) atEvringham, in Yorkshire; the hawk, at Hawkinge, in Kent; the horse, atHorsington, in Lincolnshire; the raven, at Raveningham, in Norfolk; thesun, at Sunning, in Berks; and the serpent (Wyrm), at Wormingford, Worminghall, and Wormington, in Essex, Bucks, and Gloucester, respectively. Every one of these objects is a common and well-knowntotem amongst savage tribes; and the inference that at some earlierperiod the Anglo-Saxons had been Totemists is almost irresistible. 

Moreover, it is an ascertained fact that the custom of exogamy (marriageby capture outside the tribe), and of counting kindred on the femaleside alone, accompanies the low stage of culture with which Totemism isusually associated. We know also that this method of reckoningrelationship obtained amongst certain Aryan tribes, such as the Picts. Traces of the ceremonial form of marriage by capture survived in Englandto a late date in the middle ages; and therefore the custom of exogamy, upon which the ceremony is based, must probably have existed amongst theEnglish themselves at some earlier period. Even in the first historicalage, a conquered king generally gave his daughter in marriage to hisconqueror, as a mark of submission, which is a relic of the same custom. Now, if members of the various tribes–Jutes, English, and Saxons, –usedat one time habitually to intermarry with one another, and to give theirchildren the clan-name of the father, it would follow that personsbearing the same clan-name would appear in all the tribes. Such we findto be actually the case. The Hemings, for instance, are met with in sixcounties–York, Lincoln, Huntingdon, Suffolk, Northampton, and Somerset;the Mannings occur in English Norfolk and in Saxon Dorset; theBillings, and many other clans, have left their names over the wholeland, from north to south and from east to west alike. It has often beenassumed that these facts prove the intimate intermixture of the invadingtribes; but the supposition of the former existence of exogamy, andconsequent appearance of similar clan-names in all the tribes, seems farmore probable than such an extreme mingling of different tribesmen overthe whole conquered territory. [1] Part of the early English ceremony ofmarriage consisted in the bridegroom touching the head of the bride witha shoe, a relic, doubtless, of the original mode of capture, when thecaptor placed his foot on the neck of his prisoner or slave. Aftermarriage, the wife's hair was cut short, which is a universal mark ofslavery. 

 [1] I owe this ingenious explanation to a note in Mr. Andrew Lang's essays prefixed to Mr. Holland's translation of Aristotle's _Politics_. He has there also suggested the analysis of the clan names for traces of Totemism, whose results I have given above in part. 

Thus we may divide the early English religion into four elements. First, the remnants of a very primitive savage faith, represented by thesanctity of animals and plants, by Totemism, by the needfire, and by theuse of amulets, charms, and spells. Second, the relics of the old commonAryan nature-worship, found in the reverence paid to Thunor, or Thunder, who is a form of Zeus, and in the sacredness of hills, rivers, wells, fords, and the open air. Third, a system of Teutonic hero orancestor-worship, typified by Woden, Bældæg, and the other great namesof the genealogies, and having its origin in the belief in ghosts. Fourth, a deification of certain abstract ideas, such as War, Fate, Victory, and Death. But the average heathen Anglo-Saxon religion wasmerely a vast mass of superstition, a dark and gloomy terrorism, begotten of the vague dread of misfortune which barbarians naturallyfeel in a half-peopled land, where war and massacre are the highestbusiness of every man's lifetime, and a violent death the ordinary wayin which he meets his end. 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 

It was impossible that a country lying within sight of the orthodoxFrankish kingdom, and enclosed between two Christian Churches on eitherside, should long remain in such a state of isolated heathendom. For tobe cut off from Christendom was to be cut off from the whole social, political, intellectual, and commercial life of the civilised world. InBritain, as distinctly as in the Pacific Islands in our own day, themissionary was the pioneer of civilisation. The change whichChristianity wrought in England in a few generations was almost asenormous as the change which it has wrought in Hawaii at the presenttime. Before the arrival of the missionary, there was no writtenliterature, no industrial arts, no peace, no social intercourse betweendistrict and district. The church came as a teacher and civiliser, andin a few years the barbarous heathen English warrior had settled downinto a toilsome agriculturist, an eager scholar, a peaceful law-giver, or an earnest priest. The change was not merely a change of religion, itwas a revolution from a life of barbarism to a life of incipientculture, and slow but progressive civilisation. 

So inevitable was the Christianisation of England, that even while theflood of paganism was pouring westward, the east was beginning toreceive the faith of Rome from the Frankish kingdom and from Italy. Ithas been necessary, indeed, to anticipate a little, in order to show thestory of the conquest in its true light. Ten years before the heathenÆthelfrith of Northumbria massacred the Welsh monks at Chester, Augustine had brought Christianity to the people of Kent. 

In 596, Gregory the Great determined to send a mission to England. Evenbefore that time, Kent had been in closer union with the Continent thanany other part of the country. Trade went on with the kindred Saxoncoast of the Frankish kingdom, and Æthelberht, the ambitious Kentishking, and over-lord of all England south of the Humber, had even marriedBercta, a daughter of the Frankish king of Paris. Bercta was of course aChristian, and she brought her own Frankish chaplain, who officiated inthe old Roman church of St. Martin, at Canterbury. But Gregory's missionwas on a far larger scale. Augustine, prior of the monastery on theCœlian Hill, was sent with forty monks to convert the heathenEnglish. They landed in Thanet, in 597, with all the pomp of Romancivilisation and ecclesiastical symbolism. Gregory had rightlydetermined to try by ritual and show to impress the barbarian mind. Æthelberht, already predisposed to accept the Continental culture, andto assimilate his rude kingdom to the Roman model, met them in the openair at a solemn meeting; for he feared, says Bæda, to meet them withinfour walls, lest they should practice incantations upon him. The foreignmonks advanced in procession to the king's presence, chanting theirlitanies, and displaying a silver cross. Æthelberht yielded almost atonce. He and all his court became Christians; and the people, as isusual amongst barbarous tribes, quickly conformed to the faith of theirrulers. Æthelberht gave the missionaries leave to build new churches, orto repair the old ones erected by the Welsh Christians. Augustinereturned to Gaul, where he was consecrated as Archbishop of the Englishnation, at Arles. Kent became thenceforth a part of the greatContinental system. Canterbury has ever since remained the metropolis ofthe English Church; and the modern archbishops trace back theirsuccession directly to St. Augustine. 

For awhile, the young Church seemed to make vigorous progress. Augustinebuilt a monastery at Canterbury, where Æthelberht founded a new churchto SS. Peter and Paul, to be a sort of Westminster Abbey for the tombsof all future Kentish kings and archbishops. He also restored an oldRoman church in the city. The pope sent him sacramental vessels, altarcloths, ornaments, relics, and, above all, many books. Ten years later, Augustine enlarged his missionary field by ordaining two newbishops–Mellitus, to preach to the East Saxons, "whose metropolis, "says Bæda, "is the city of London, which is the mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and land;" and Justus to the episcopal see ofWest Kent, with his bishop-stool at Rochester. The East Saxonsnominally accepted the faith at the bidding of their over-lord, Æthelberht; but the people of London long remained pagans at heart. OnAugustine's death, however, all life seemed again to die out of thestruggling mission. Laurentius, who succeeded him, found the labour toogreat for his weaker hands. In 613 Æthelberht died, and his son Eadbaldat once apostatised, returning to the worship of Woden and the ancestralgods. The East Saxons drove out Mellitus, who, with Justus, retired toGaul; and Archbishop Laurentius himself was minded to follow them. Thenthe Kentish king, admonished by a dream of the archbishop's, madesubmission, recalled the truant bishops, and restored Justus toRochester. The Londoners, however, would not receive back Mellitus, "choosing rather to be under their idolatrous high-priests. " SoonLaurentius died too, and Mellitus was called to take his place, andconsecrated at last a church in London in the monastery of St. Peter. In624, the third archbishop was carried off by gout, and Justus ofRochester succeeded to the primacy of the struggling church. Up to thispoint little had been gained, except the conversion of Kent itself, withits dependent kingdom of Essex–the two parts of England in closestunion with the Continent, through the mercantile intercourse by way ofLondon and Richborough. 

Under the new primate, however, an unexpected opening occurred for theconversion of the North. The Northumbrian kings had now risen to thefirst place in Britain. Æthelfrith had done much to establish theirsupremacy; under Eadwine it rose to a height of acknowledgedover-lordship. "As an earnest of this king's future conversion andtranslation to the kingdom of heaven, " says Bæda, with pardonableNorthumbrian patriotic pride, "even his temporal power was allowed toincrease greatly, so that he did what no Englishman had donebefore–that is to say, he united under his own over-lordship all theprovinces of Britain, whether inhabited by English or by Welsh. " Eadwinenow took in marriage Æthelburh, daughter of Æthelberht, and sister ofthe reigning Kentish king. Justus seized the opportunity to introducethe Church into Northumbria. He ordained one Paulinus as bishop, toaccompany the Christian lady, to watch over her faith, and if possibleto convert her husband and his people. 

Gregory had planned his scheme with systematic completeness; he haddecided that there should be two metropolitan provinces, of York andLondon (which he knew as the old Roman capitals of Britain), and thateach should consist of twelve episcopal sees. Paulinus now went to Yorkin furtherance of this comprehensive but abortive scheme. A miraculousescape from assassination, or what was reputed one, gave the Roman monka hold over Eadwine's mind; but the king decided to put off hisconversion till he had tried the efficacy of the new faith by apractical appeal. He went on an expedition against the treacherous kingof the West Saxons, who had endeavoured to assassinate him, anddetermined to abide by the result. Having overthrown his enemy withgreat slaughter, he returned to his royal city of Coningsborough (theking's town), and put himself as a catechumen under the care ofPaulinus. The pope himself was induced to interest himself in sopromising a convert; and he wrote a couple of briefs to Eadwine and hisqueen. These letters, the originals of which were carefully preserved atRome, are copied out in full by Bæda. No doubt, the honour of receivingsuch an epistle from the pontiff of the Eternal City was not without itseffect upon the semi-barbaric mind of Eadwine, who seems in somerespects to have inherited the old Roman traditions of Eboracum. 

Still the king held back. To change his own faith was to change thefaith of the whole nation, and he thought it well to consult his witan. The old English assembly was always aristocratic in character, despiteits ostensible democracy, for it consisted only of the heads offamilies; and as the kingdoms grew larger, their aristocratic characternecessarily became more pronounced, as only the wealthier persons couldbe in attendance upon the king. The folk-moot had grown into thewitena-gemot, or assembly of wise men. Eadwine assembled such a meetingon the banks of the Derwent–for moots were always held in the open airat some sacred spot–and there the priests and thegns declared theirwillingness to accept the new religion. Coifi, chief priest of theheathen gods, himself led the way, and flung a lance in derision at thetemple of his own deities. To the surprise of all, the gods did notavenge the insult. Thereupon "King Æduin, with all the nobles and mostof the common folk of his nation, received the faith and the font ofholy regeneration, in the eleventh year of his reign, which is the yearof our Lord's incarnation the six hundred and twenty-seventh, and aboutthe hundred and eightieth after the arrival of the English in Britain. He was baptized at York on Easter-day, the first before the Ides ofApril (April 12), in the church of St. Peter the Apostle, which hehimself had hastily built of wood, while he was being catechised andprepared for Baptism; and in the same city he gave the bishopric to hisprelate and sponsor Paulinus. But after his Baptism he took care, byPaulinus's direction, to build a larger and finer church of stone, inthe midst whereof his original chapel should be enclosed. " To this day, York Minster, the lineal descendant of Eadwine's wooden church, remainsdedicated to St. Peter; and the archbishops still sit in thebishop-stool of Paulinus. Part of Eadwine's later stone cathedral wasdiscovered under the existing choir during the repairs renderednecessary by the incendiary Martin. As to the heathen temple, its tracesstill remained even in Bæda's day. "That place, formerly the abode ofidols, is now pointed out not far from York to the westward, beyond theriver Dornuentio, and is to-day called Godmundingaham, where the priesthimself, through the inspiration of the true God, polluted and destroyedthe altars which he himself had consecrated. " So close did Bæda live tothese early heathen English times. From the date of St. Augustine'sarrival, indeed, Bæda stands upon the surer ground of almostcontemporary narrative. 

Still the greater part of English Britain remained heathen. Kent, Essex, and Northumbria were converted, or at least their kings and nobles hadbeen baptised: but East Anglia, Mercia, Sussex, Wessex, and the minorinterior principalities were as yet wholly heathen. Indeed, the variousTeutonic colonies seemed to have received Christianity in the exactorder of their settlement: the older and more civilised first, the newerand ruder last. Paulinus, however, made another conquest for the churchin Lindsey (Lincolnshire), "where the first who believed, " says theChronicle, "was a certain great man who hight Blecca, with all hisclan. " In the very same year with these successes, Justus died, andHonorius received the See of Canterbury from Paulinus at the old Romancity of Lincoln. So far the Roman missionaries remained the onlyChristian teachers in England: no English convert seems as yet to havetaken holy orders. 

Again, however, the church received a severe check. Mercia, the youngestand roughest principality, stood out for heathendom. The western colonywas beginning to raise itself into a great power, under its fierce andstrong old king Penda, who seems to have consolidated all the pettychieftainships of the Midlands into a single fairly coherent kingdom. Penda hated Northumbria, which, under Eadwine, had made itself the chiefEnglish state: and he also hated Christianity, which he knew only as areligion fit for Welsh slaves, not for English warriors. For twenty-twoyears, therefore, the old heathen king waged an untiring war againstChristian Northumbria. In 633, he allied himself with Cadwalla, theChristian Welsh king of Gwynedd, or North Wales, in a war againstEadwine; an alliance which supplies one more proof that the gulf betweenWelsh and English was not so wide as it is sometimes represented to be. The Welsh and Mercian host met the Northumbrians at Heathfield (perhapsHatfield Chase) and utterly destroyed them. Eadwine himself and his sonOsfrith were slain. Penda and Cadwalla "fared thence, and undid allNorthumbria. " The country was once more divided into Deira and Bernicia, and two heathen rulers succeeded to the northern kingdom. Paulinus, taking Æthelburh, the widow of Eadwine, went by sea to Kent, whereHonorius, whom he had himself consecrated, received him cordially, andgave him the vacant see of Rochester. There he remained till his death, and so for a time ended the Christian mission to York. Penda made thebest of his victory by annexing the Southumbrians, the Middle English, and the Lindiswaras, as well as by conquering the Severn Valley from theWest Saxons. Henceforth, Mercia stands forth as one of the three leadingTeutonic states in Britain. 

CHAPTER X. 

ROME AND IONA. 

It was not the Roman mission which finally succeeded in converting theNorth and the Midlands. That success was due to the Scottish and PictishChurch. At the end of the sixth century, Columba, an Irish missionary, crossed over to the solitary rock of Iona, where he established an abbeyon the Irish model, and quickly evangelised the northern Picts. FromIona, some generations later, went forth the devoted missionaries whofinally converted the northern half of England. 

The native churches of the west, cut off from direct intercourse withthe main body of Latin Christendom, had retained certain habits whichwere now regarded by Rome as schismatical. Chief among these were thedate of celebrating Easter, and the uncanonical method of cutting thetonsure in a crescent instead of a circle. Augustine, shortly after hisarrival, endeavoured to obtain unity between the two churches on thesematters of discipline, to which great importance was attached as testsof submission to the Latin rule. He obtained from Æthelberht asafe-conduct through the heathen West-Saxon territories as far as whatis now Worcestershire; and there, "on the borders of the Huiccii andthe West-Saxons, " says Bæda, "he convened to a colloquy the bishops anddoctors of the nearest province of the Britons, in the place which, tothe present day, is called in the English language, Augustine's Oak. "Such open-air meetings by sacred trees or stones were universal inEngland both before and after its conversion. "He began to admonish themwith a brotherly admonition to embrace with him the Catholic faith, andto undertake the common task of evangelising the pagans. For they didnot observe Easter at the proper period: moreover, they did many otherthings contrary to the unity of the Church. " But the Welsh were jealousof the intruders, and refused to abandon their old customs. Thereupon, Augustine declared that if they would not help him against the heathen, they would perish by the heathen. A few years later, after Augustine'sdeath, this prediction was verified by Æthelfrith of Northumbria, whosemassacre of the monks of Bangor has already been noticed. 

It was in return for the destruction of Chester and the slaughter of themonks that Cadwalla joined the heathen Penda against his fellowChristian Eadwine. But the death of Eadwine left the throne open for thehouse of Æthelfrith, whose place Eadwine had taken. After a year ofrenewed heathendom, however, during part of which the Welsh Cadwallareigned over Northumbria, Oswald, son of Æthelfrith, again united Deiraand Bernicia under his own rule. Oswald was a Christian, but he hadlearnt his Christianity from the Scots, amongst whom he had spent hisexile, and he favoured the introduction of Pictish and Scottishmissionaries into Northumbria. The Italian monks who had accompaniedAugustine were men of foreign speech and manners, representatives of analien civilisation, and they attempted to convert whole kingdoms _enbloc_ by the previous conversion of their rulers. Their method waspolitical and systematic. But the Pictish and Irish preachers were menof more Britannic feelings, and they went to work with true missionaryearnestness to convert the half Celtic people of Northumbria, man byman, in their own homes. Aidan, the apostle of the north, carried thePictish faith into the Lothians and Northumberland. He placed hisbishop-stool not far from the royal town of Bamborough, at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island of the Northumbrian coast. Other Celtic missionariespenetrated further south, even into the heathen realm of Penda and histributary princes. Ceadda or Chad, the patron saint of Lichfield, carried Christianity to the Mercians. Diuma preached to the MiddleEnglish of Leicester with much success, Peada, their ealdorman, son ofPenda, having himself already embraced the new faith. Penda had slainOswald in a great battle at Maserfeld in 641; but the martyr onlybrought increased glory to the Christians: and Oswiu, who succeeded him, after an interval of anarchy, as king of Deira (for Bernicia now chose aking of its own), was also a zealous adherent of the Celticmissionaries. Thus the heterodox Church made rapid strides throughoutthe whole of the north. 

Meanwhile, in the south the Latin missionaries, urged to activity, perhaps, by the Pictish successes, had been making fresh progress. Inthe very year when Oswald was chosen king by the Northumbrians, Birinus, a priest from northern Italy, went by command of the pope to the WestSaxons: and after twelve months he was able to baptise their king, Cynegils, at his capital of Dorchester, on the Thames, his sponsor beingOswald of Northumbria. A year later, Felix, a Burgundian, "preached thefaith of Christ to the East Anglians, " who had indeed been converted bythe Augustinian missionaries, but afterwards relapsed. Only Sussex andMercia still remained heathen. But, in 655, Penda made a last attemptagainst Northumbria, which he had harried year after year, and was metby Oswiu at Winwidfield, near Leeds; the Christians were successful, andPenda was slain, together with thirty royal persons–petty princes ofthe tributary Mercian states, no doubt. His son, Peada, the Christianealdorman of the Middle English, succeeded him, and the Mercians becameChristians of the Pictish or Irish type. "Their first bishop, " saysBæda, "was Diuma, who died and was buried among the Middle English. Thesecond was Cellach, who abandoned his bishopric, and returned during hislifetime to Scotland (perhaps Ireland, but more probably the Scottishkingdom in Argyllshire). Both of these were by birth Irishmen. The thirdwas Trumhere, by race an Englishman, but educated and ordained by theIrish. " Thus Roman Christianity spread over the whole of England southof the Wash (save only heathen Sussex): while the Irish Church had madeits way over all the north, from the Wash to the Firth of Forth. TheRoman influence may be partly traced by the Roman alphabet supersedingthe old English runes. Runic inscriptions are rare in the south, wherethey were regarded as heathenish relics, and so destroyed: but they arecomparatively common in the north. Runics appear on the coins of thefirst Christian kings of Mercia, Peada and Æthelred, but soon die outunder their successors. 

Heathendom was now fairly vanquished. It survived only in Sussex, cutoff from the rest of England by the forest belt of the Weald. The nexttrial of strength must clearly lie between Rome and Iona. 

The northern bishops and abbots traced their succession, not toAugustine, but to Columba. Cuthberht, the English apostle of the north, who really converted the _people_ of Northumbria, as earliermissionaries had converted its _kings_, derived his orders from Iona. Rome or Ireland, was now the practical question of the English Church. As might be expected, Rome conquered. To allay the discord, King Oswiusummoned a synod at Streoneshalch (now known by its later Danish name ofWhitby) in 664, to settle the vexed question as to the date of Easter. The Irish priests claimed the authority of St. John for their crescenttonsure; the Romans, headed by Wilfrith, a most vigorous priest, appealed to the authority of St. Peter for the canonical circle. "I willnever offend the saint who holds the keys of heaven, " said Oswiu, withthe frank, half-heathendom of a recent convert; and the meeting shortlydecided as the king would have it. The Irish party acquiesced or elsereturned to Scotland; and thenceforth the new English Church remained inclose communion with Rome and the Continent. Whatever may be ourecclesiastical judgment of this decision, there can be little doubt thatits material effects were most excellent. By bringing England intoconnection with Rome, it brought her into connection with the centre ofall then-existing civilisation, and endowed her with arts andmanufactures which she could never otherwise have attained. Theconnection with Ireland and the north would have been as fatal, from apurely secular point of view, to early English culture as was the laterconnection with half-barbaric Scandinavia. Rome gave England the Romanletters, arts, and organisation: Ireland could only have given her amore insular form of Celtic civilisation. 

CHAPTER XI. 

CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. 

The change wrought in England by the introduction of the new faith wasimmense and sudden at the moment, as well as deep-reaching in its afterconsequences. The isolated heathen barbaric communities became at oncean integral part of the great Roman and Christian civilisation. Evenbefore the arrival of Augustine, some slight tincture of Roman influencehad filtered through into the English world. The Welsh serfs hadpreserved some traditional knowledge of Roman agriculture; Kent had keptup some intercourse with the Continent; and even in York, Eadwineaffected a certain imitation of Roman pomp. But after the introductionof Christianity, Roman civilisation began to produce marked results overthe whole country. Writing, before almost unknown, or confined to theengraving of runic characters on metal objects, grew rapidly into acommon art. The Latin language was introduced, and with it the key tothe Latin literature and Latin science, the heirlooms of Greece and theEast. Roman influences affected the little courts of the English kings;and the customary laws began to be written down in regular codes. Beforethe conversion we have not a single written document upon which to baseour history; from the moment of Augustine's landing we have theinvaluable works of Bæda, and a host of lesser writings (chiefly livesof saints), besides an immense number of charters or royal grants ofland to monasteries and private persons. These grants, written at firstin Latin, but afterwards in Anglo-Saxon, were preserved in themonasteries down to the date of their dissolution, and then became theproperty of various collectors. They have been transcribed and publishedby Mr. Kemble and Mr. Thorpe, and they form some of our most usefulmaterials for the early history of Christian England. 

It was mainly by means of the monasteries that Christianity became agreat civilising and teaching agency in England. Those who judgemonastic institutions only by their later and worst days, when they had, perhaps, ceased to perform any useful function, are apt to forget thebenefits which they conferred upon the people in the earlier stages oftheir existence. The state of England during this first Christian periodwas one of chronic and bloody warfare. There was no regular army, butevery freeman was a soldier, and raids of one English tribe upon anotherwere everyday occurrences; while pillaging frays on the part of theWelsh, followed by savage reprisals on the part of the English, werestill more frequent. During the heathen period, even the Picts seemoften to have made piractical expeditions far into the south of England. In 597, for example, we read in the Chronicle that Ceolwulf, king of theWest Saxons, constantly fought "either against the English, or againstthe Welsh, or against the Picts. " But in 603, the Argyllshire Scots madea raid against Northumbria, and were so completely crushed byÆthelfrith, that "since then no king of Scots durst lead a host againstthis folk"; while the southern Picts of Galloway became tributaries ofthe Northumbrian kings. But war between Saxons and English, or betweenTeutons and Welsh, still remained chronic; and Christianity did littleto prevent these perpetual border wars and raids. In 633, Cadwalla andPenda wasted Northumbria; in 644, Penda drove out King Kenwealh, of theWest Saxons, from his possessions along the Severn; in 671, Wulfhere, the Mercian, ravaged Wessex and the south as far as Ashdown, andconquered Wight, which he gave to the South Saxons; and so, from time totime, we catch glimpses of the unceasing strife between each folk andits neighbours, besides many hints of intestine struggles between princeand prince, or of rivalries between one petty shire and others of thesame kingdom, far too numerous and unimportant to be detailed here infull. 

With such a state of affairs as this, it became a matter of deepimportance that there should be some one institution where the arts ofpeace might be carried on in safety; where agriculture might be sure ofits reward; where literature and science might be studied; and wherecivilising influences might be safe from interruption or rapine. Themonasteries gave an opportunity for such an ameliorating influence tospring up. They were spared even in war by the reverence of the peoplefor the Church; and they became places where peaceful minds mightretire for honest work, and learning, and thinking, away from the fierceturmoil of a still essentially barbaric and predatory community. At thesame time, they encouraged the development of this very type of mind byturning the reproach of cowardice, which it would have carried with itin heathen times, into an honour and a mark of holiness. Every monasterybecame a centre of light and of struggling culture for the surroundingdistrict. They were at once, to the early English recluse, universitiesand refuges, places of education, of retirement, and of peace, in themidst of a jarring and discordant world. 

Hence, almost the first act of every newly-converted prince was to founda monastery in his dominions. That of Canterbury dates from the arrivalof Augustine. In 643, Kenwealh of Wessex "bade timber the old minster atWinchester. " In 654, shortly after the conversion of East Anglia, "Botulf began to build a monastery at Icanho, " since called after hisname Botulf's tun, or Boston. In 657, Peada of Mercia and Oswiu ofNorthumbria "said that they would rear a monastery to the glory ofChrist and the honour of St. Peter; and they did so, and gave it thename of Medeshamstede"; but it is now known as Peterborough. [1]

 [1] The charter is a late forgery, but there is no reason to doubt that it represents the correct tradition. 

Before the battle of Winwidfield, Oswiu had vowed to build twelveminsters in his kingdom, and he redeemed his vow by founding six inBernicia and six in Deira. In 669, Ecgberht of Kent "gave Reculver toBass, the mass-priest, to build a monastery thereon. " In 663, Æthelthryth, a lady of royal blood, better known by the Latinised nameof St. Etheldreda, "began the monastery at Ely. " Before Bæda's death, in735, religious houses already existed at Lastingham, Melrose, Lindisfarne, Whithern, Bardney, Gilling, Bury, Ripon, Chertsey, Barking, Abercorn, Selsey, Redbridge, Coldingham, Towcester, Hackness, andseveral other places. So the whole of England was soon covered withmonastic establishments, each liberally endowed with land, and eachengaged in tilling the soil without, and cultivating peaceful artswithin, like little islands of southern civilisation, dotted about inthe wide sea of Teutonic barbarism. 

In the Roman south, many, if not all, of the monasteries seem to havebeen planned on the regular models; but in the north, where the Irishmissionaries had borne the largest share in the work of conversion, themonasteries were irregular bodies on the Irish plan, where an abbot orabbess ruled over a mixed community of monks and nuns. Hild, a member ofthe Northumbrian princely family, founded such an abbey at Streoneshalch(Whitby), made memorable by numbering amongst its members the firstknown English poet, Cædmon. St. John of Beverley, Bishop of Hexham, setup a similar monastery at the place with which his name is so closelyassociated. The Irish monks themselves founded others at Lindisfarne andelsewhere. Even in the south, some Irish abbeys existed. An Irish monkhad set up one at Bosham, in Sussex, even before Wilfrith converted thatkingdom; and one of his countrymen, Maidulf (or Maeldubh?) was theoriginal head of Malmesbury. In process of time, however, as the unionwith Rome grew stronger, all these houses conformed to the more regularusage, and became monasteries of the ordinary Benedictine type. 

The civilising value of the monasteries can hardly be over-rated. Securein the peace conferred upon them by a religious sanction, the monksbecame the builders of schools, the drainers of marshland, the clearersof forest, the tillers of heath. Many of the earliest religious housesrose in the midst of what had previously been trackless wilds. Peterborough and Ely grew up on islands of the Fen country. Crowlandgathered round the cell of Guthlac in the midst of a desolate mere. Evesham occupied a glade in the wild forests of the western march. Glastonbury, an old Welsh foundation, stood on a solitary islet, wherethe abrupt knoll of the Tor looks down upon the broad waste of theSomersetshire marshes. Beverley, as its name imports, had been a hauntof beavers before the monks began to till its fruitful dingles. In everycase agriculture soon turned the wild lands into orchards andcornfields, or drove drains through the fens which converted theirmarshes into meadows and pastures for the long-horned English cattle. Roman architecture, too, came with the Roman church. We hear nothingbefore of stone buildings; but Eadwine erected a church of stone atYork, under the direction of Paulinus; and Bishop Wilfrith, ageneration later, restored and decorated it, covering the roof with leadand filling the windows with panes of glass. Masons had already beensettled in Kent, though Benedict, the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, found it desirable to bring over others from the Franks. Metal-workinghad always been a special gift of the English, and their gold jewellerywas well made even before the conversion, but it became still morenoticeable after the monks took the craft into their own hands. Bædamentions mines of copper, iron, lead, silver, and jet. Abbot Benedictnot only brought manuscripts and pictures from Rome, which were copiedand imitated in his monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, but he alsobrought over glass-blowers, who introduced the art of glass-making intoEngland. Cuthberht, Bæda's scholar, writes to Lull, asking for workmenwho can make glass vessels. Bells appear to have been equally earlyintroductions. Roman music of course accompanied the Roman liturgy. Theconnection established with the clergy of the continent favoured thedispersion of European goods throughout England. We constantly hear ofpresents, consisting of skilled handicraft, passing from the civilisedsouth to the rude and barbaric north. Wilfrith and Benedict journeyedseveral times to and from Rome, enlarging their own minds by intercoursewith Roman society, and returning laden with works of art or manuscriptsof value. Bæda was acquainted with the writings of all the chiefclassical poets and philosophers, whom he often quotes. We can onlyliken the results of such intercourse to those which in our own timehave proceeded from the opening of Japan to western ideas, or of theHawaiian Islands to European civilisation and European missionaries. TheEnglish school which soon sprang up at Rome, and the Latin schools whichsoon sprang up at York and Canterbury, are precise equivalents of theeducational movements in both those countries which we see in our ownday. The monks were to learn Latin and Greek "as well as they learnedtheir own tongue, " and were so to be given the key of all the literatureand all the science that the world then possessed. 

The monasteries thus became real manufacturing, agricultural, andliterary centres on a small scale. The monks boiled down the salt of thebrine-pits; they copied and illuminated manuscripts in the library; theypainted pictures not without rude merit of their own; they ran rhinesthrough the marshy moorland; they tilled the soil with vigour andsuccess. A new culture began to occupy the land–the culture whosefully-developed form we now see around us. But it must never beforgotten that in its origin it is wholly Roman, and not at allAnglo-Saxon. Our people showed themselves singularly apt at embracingit, like the modern Polynesians, and unlike the American Indians; butthey did not invent it for themselves. Our existing culture is nothome-bred at all; it is simply the inherited and widened culture ofGreece and Italy. 

The most perfect picture of the monastic life and of early EnglishChristianity which we possess is that drawn for us in the life andworks of Bæda. Before giving any account, however, of the sketch whichhe has left us, it will be necessary to follow briefly the course ofevents in the English church during the few intervening years. 

The Church of England in its existing form owes its organisation to aGreek monk. In 667, Oswiu of Northumbria and Ecgberht of Kent, in orderto bring their dominions into closer connection with Rome, united insending Wigheard the priest to the pope, that he might be hallowedArchbishop of Canterbury. No Englishman had yet held that office, andthe choice may be regarded as a symptom of growth in the native Church. But Wigheard died at Rome, and the pope seized the opportunity toconsecrate an archbishop in the Roman interest. His choice fell upon oneTheodore, a monk of Tarsus in Cilicia, who was in the orders of theEastern church. The pope was particular, however, that Theodore shouldnot "introduce anything contrary to the verity of the faith into theChurch over which he was to preside. " Theodore accepted Roman orders andthe Roman tonsure, and set out for his province, where he arrived aftervarious adventures on the way. His re-organisation of the young Churchwas thorough and systematic. Originally England had been divided intoseven great dioceses, corresponding to the principal kingdoms (save onlystill heathen Sussex), and having their sees in their chief towns–Eastand West Kent, at Canterbury and Rochester; Essex, at London; Wessex, atDorchester or Winchester; Northumbria, at York; East Anglia, atDunwich; and Mercia, at Lichfield. The Scottish bishopric of Lindisfarnecoincided with Bernicia. Theodore divided these great dioceses intosmaller ones; East Anglia had two, for its north and south folk, atElmham and Dunwich; Bernicia was divided between Lindisfarne and Hexham;Lincolnshire had its see placed at Sidnacester; and the sub-kingdoms ofMercia were also made into dioceses, the Huiccii having theirbishop-stool at Worcester; the Hecans, at Hereford; and the MiddleEnglish, at Leicester. But Theodore's great work was the establishmentof the national synod, in which all the clergy of the various Englishkingdoms met together as a single people. This was the first step evertaken towards the unification of England; and the ecclesiastical unitythus preceded and paved the way for the political unity which was tofollow it. Theodore's organisation brought the whole Church intoconnection with Rome. The bishops owing their orders to the Scotsconformed or withdrew, and henceforward Rome held undisputed sway. Before Theodore, all the archbishops of Canterbury and all the bishopsof the southern kingdoms had been Roman missionaries; those of the northhad been Scots or in Scottish orders. After Theodore they were allEnglishmen in Roman orders. The native church became thenceforwardwholly self-supporting. 

Theodore was much aided in his projects by Wilfrith of York, a man offiery energy and a devoted adherent of the Roman see, who had carriedthe Roman supremacy at the Synod of Whitby, and who spent a large partof his time in journeys between England and Italy. His life, by Æddi, forms one of the most important documents for early English history. In681 he completed the conversion of England by his preaching to the SouthSaxons, whom he endeavoured to civilise as well as Christianise. Hismonastery of Selsey was built on land granted by the under-king (now atributary of Wessex), and his first act was to emancipate the slaveswhom he found upon the soil. Equally devoted to Rome was the youngNorthumbrian noble, who took the religious name of Benedict Biscop. Benedict became at first an inmate of the Abbey of Lérins, near Cannes. He afterwards founded two regular Benedictine abbeys on the same modelat Wearmouth and Jarrow, and made at least four visits to the papalcourt, whence he returned laden with manuscripts to introduce Romanlearning among his wild Northumbrian countrymen. He likewise carriedover silk robes for sale to the kings in exchange for grants of land;and he brought glaziers from Gaul for his churches. Jarrow alonecontained 500 monks, and possessed endowments of 15, 000 acres. 

It was under the walls of Jarrow that Bæda himself was born, in the year672. Only fifty years had passed since his native Northumbria was stilla heathen land. Not more than forty years had gone since the conversionof Wessex, and Sussex was still given over to the worship of Thunor andWoden. But Bæda's own life was one which brought him wholly intoconnection with Christian teachers and Roman culture. Left an orphan atthe age of seven years, he was handed over to the care of AbbotBenedict, after whose death Abbot Ceolfrid took charge of the youngaspirant. "Thenceforth, " says the aged monk, fifty years later, "Ipassed all my lifetime in the building of that monastery [Jarrow], andgave all my days to meditating on Scripture. In the intervals of myregular monastic discipline, and of my daily task of chanting in chapel, I have always amused myself either by learning, teaching, or writing. Inthe nineteenth year of my life I received ordination as deacon; in mythirtieth year I attained to the priesthood; both functions beingadministered by the most reverend bishop John [afterwards known as St. John of Beverley], at the request of Abbot Ceolfrid. From the time of myordination as priest to the fifty-ninth year of my life, I have occupiedmyself in briefly commenting upon Holy Scripture, for the use of myselfand my brethren, from the works of the venerable fathers, and in somecases I have added interpretations of my own to aid in theircomprehension. "

The variety of Bæda's works, the large knowledge of science and ofclassical literature which he displays (when judged by the continentalstandard of the eighth century), and his familiar acquaintance with theLatin language, which he writes easily and correctly, show that thelibrary of Jarrow must have been extensive and valuable. Besides hisScriptural commentaries, he wrote a treatise _De Natura Rerum_, Letterson the Reason of Leap-Year, a Life of St. Anastasius, and a History ofhis Own Abbey, all in Latin. In verse, he composed many pieces, both inhexameters and elegiacs, together with a treatise on prosody. But hisgreatest work is his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People, " theauthority from which we derive almost all our knowledge of earlyChristian England. It was doubtless suggested by the Frankish history ofGregory of Tours, and it consists of five books, divided into shortchapters, making up about 400 pages of a modern octavo. Fivemanuscripts, one of them transcribed only two years after Bæda's death, and now deposited in the Cambridge library, preserve for us the text ofthis priceless document. The work itself should be read in the original, or in one of the many excellent translations, by every person who takesany intelligent interest in our early history. 

Bæda's accomplishments included even a knowledge of Greek–then a rareacquisition in the west–which he probably derived from ArchbishopTheodore's school at Canterbury. He was likewise an English author, forhe translated the Gospel of St. John into his native Northumbrian; andthe task proved the last of his useful life. Several manuscripts havepreserved to us the letter of Cuthberht, afterwards Abbot of Jarrow, tohis friend Cuthwine, giving us the very date of his death, May 27, A. D. 735, and also narrating the pathetic but somewhat overdrawn picture, with which we are all familiar, of how he died just as he had completedhis translation of the last chapter. "Thus saying, he passed the day inpeace till eventide. The boy [his scribe] said to him, 'Still onesentence, beloved master, is yet unwritten. ' He answered, 'Write itquickly. ' After a while the boy said, 'Now the sentence is written. 'Then he replied, 'It is well, ' quoth he, 'thou hast said the truth: itis finished. '. . . And so he passed away to the kingdom of heaven. "

It is impossible to overrate the importance of the change which madesuch a life of earnest study and intellectual labour as Bæda's possibleamongst the rough and barbaric English. Nor was it only in producingthinkers and readers from a people who could not spell a word half acentury before, that the monastic system did good to England. Themonasteries owned large tracts of land which they could cultivate on aco-operative plan, as cultivation was impossible elsewhere. _Laborareest orare_ was the true monastic motto: and the documents of thereligious houses, relating to lands and leases, show us the other ormaterial side of the picture, which was not less important in its waythan the spiritual and intellectual side. Everywhere the monks settledin the woodland by the rivers, cut down the forests, drove out thewolves and the beavers, cultivated the soil with the aid of theirtenants and serfs, and became colonisers and civilisers at the same timethat they were teachers and preachers. The reclamation of waste landthroughout the marshes of England was due almost entirely to themonastic bodies. 

The value of the civilising influence thus exerted is seen especially inthe written laws, and it affected even the actions of the fierce Englishprinces. The dooms of Æthelberht of Kent are the earliest Englishdocuments which we possess, and they were reduced to writing shortlyafter the conversion of the first English Christian king: while Bædaexpressly mentions that they were compiled after Roman models. TheChurch was not able to hold the warlike princes really in check; but itimposed penances, and encouraged many of them to make pilgrimages toRome, and to end their days in a cloister. The importance of suchpilgrimages was doubtless immense. They induced the rude insularnobility to pay a visit to what was still, after all, the most civilisedcountry of the world, and so to gain some knowledge of a foreignculture, which they afterwards endeavoured to introduce into their ownhomes. In 688, Ceadwalla, the ferocious king of the West Saxons, whosebrother Mul had been burnt alive by the men of Kent, and who harried theJutish kingdom in return, and who also murdered two princes of Wight, with all their people, in cold blood, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was baptised, and died immediately after. [2] Ine, who succeededhim, re-endowed the old British monastery of Glastonbury, in territoryjust conquered from the West Welsh, and reduced the laws of the WestSaxons to writing. He, too, retired to Rome, where he died. In 704, Æthelred, son of Penda, king of the Mercians, "assumed monkhood. " In709, Cenred, his successor, and Offa of Essex, went to Rome. And so onfor many years, king after king resigned his kingship, and submitted, inhis latter days, to the Church. Within two centuries, no less thanthirty kings and queens are recorded to have embraced a conventual life:and far more probably did so, but were passed over in silence. Bædatells us that many Englishmen went into monasteries in Gaul. 

 [2] He was buried at St. Peter's, and his tomb still exists in the remodelled building. Bæda quotes the inscription in full, and quotes it correctly; a fact which may be taken as an excellent test of his historical accuracy, and the care with which he collected his materials. 

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that while Christianity madegreat progress, many marks of heathendom were still left among thepeople. Well-worship and stone-worship, devil-craft and sacrifices toidols, are mentioned in every Anglo-Saxon code of laws, and had to beprovided against even as late as the time of Eadgar. The belief in elvesand other semi-heathen beings, and the reverence for heathen memorials, was rife, and shows itself in such names as Ælfred, elf-counsel;Ælfstan, elf-stone; Ælfgifu, elf-given; Æthelstan, noble-stone; andWulfstan, wolf-stone. Heathendom was banished from high places, but itlingered on among the lower classes, and affected the nomenclature evenof the later West Saxon kings themselves. Indeed, it was closelyinterwoven with all the life and thought of the people, and entered, inaltered forms, even into the conceptions of Christianity current amongstthem. The Christian poem of Cædmon is tinctured on every page with ideasderived from the legends of the old heathen mythology. And it willprobably surprise many to learn that even at this late date, tattooingcontinued to be practised by the English chieftains. 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS. 

With the final triumph of Christianity, all the formative elements ofAnglo-Saxon Britain are complete. We see it, a rough conglomeration ofloosely-aggregated principalities, composed of a fighting aristocracyand a body of unvalued serfs; while interspersed through its parts arethe bishops, monks, and clergy, centres of nascent civilisation for theseething mass of noble barbarism. The country is divided intoagricultural colonies, and its only industry is agriculture, its onlywealth, land. We want but one more conspicuous change to make it intothe England of the Augustan Anglo-Saxon age–the reign of Eadgar–andthat one change is the consolidation of the discordant kingdoms under asingle loose over-lordship. To understand this final step, we mustglance briefly at the dull record of the political history. 

Under Æthelfrith, Eadwine, and Oswiu, Northumbria had been the chiefpower in England. But the eighth century is taken up with the greatnessof Mercia. Ecgfrith, the last great king of Northumbria, whoseover-lordship extended over the Picts of Galloway and the Cumbrians ofStrathclyde, endeavoured to carry his conquests beyond the Forth, andannex the free land lying to the north of the old Roman line. He wasdefeated and slain, and with him fell the supremacy of Northumbria. Mercia, which already, under Penda and Wulfhere, had risen to the secondplace, now assumed the first position among the Teutonic kingdoms. Unfortunately we know little of the period of Mercian supremacy. TheWest Saxon chronicle contains few notices of the rival state, and we arethrown for information chiefly on the second-hand Latin historians ofthe twelfth century. Æthelbald, the first powerful Mercian king(716-755), "ravaged the land of the Northumbrians, " and made Wessexacknowledge his supremacy. By this time all the minor kingdoms hadpractically become subject to the three great powers, though stillretaining their native princes: and Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbriashared between them, as suzerains, the whole of Teutonic Britain. Themeagre annals of the Chronicle, upon which alone (with the Charters andLatin writers of later date) we rest after the death of Bæda, show us achaotic list of wars and battles between these three great powersthemselves, or between them and their vassals, or with the Welsh andDevonians. Æthelbald was succeeded, after a short interval, by Offa, whose reign of nearly forty years (758-796), is the first settled periodin English history. Offa ruled over the subject princes with rigour, andseems to have made his power really felt. He drove the Prince of Powysfrom Shrewsbury, and carried his ravages into the heart of Wales. Heconquered the land between the Severn and the Wye, and his dyke fromthe Dee to the Severn, and the Wye, marked the new limits of the Welshand English borders; while his laws codified the customs of Mercia, asthose of Æthelberht and Ine had done with the customs of Kent andWessex. He set up for awhile an archbishopric at Lichfield, which seemsto mark his determination to erect Mercia into a sovereign power. Healso founded the great monastery of St. Alban's, and is said to haveestablished the English college at Rome, though another accountattributes it to Ine, the West Saxon. East Anglia, Kent, Essex, andSussex all acknowledged his supremacy. Karl the Great was then revivingthe Roman Empire in its Germanic form, and Offa ventured to correspondwith the Frank emperor as an equal. The possession of London, now aMercian city, gave Offa an interest in continental affairs; and thegrowth of trade is marked by the fact that when a quarrel arose betweenthem, they formally closed the ports of their respective kingdomsagainst each other's subjects. 

Nevertheless, English kingship still remained a mere military office, and consolidation, in our modern sense, was clearly impossible. Localjealousies divided all the little kingdoms and their componentprincipalities; and any real subordination was impracticable amongst apurely agricultural and warlike people, with no regular army, andgoverned only by their own anarchic desires. Like the Afghans of thepresent time, the early English were incapable of union, except in atemporary way under the strong hand of a single warlike leader against acommon foe. As soon as that was removed, they fell asunder at once intotheir original separateness. Hence the chaotic nature of our earlyannals, in which it is impossible to discover any real order underlyingthe perpetual flux of states and princes. 

A single story from the Chronicle will sufficiently illustrate the typeof men whose actions make up the history of these predatory times. In754, King Cuthred of the West Saxons died. His kinsman, Sigeberht, succeeded him. One year later, however, Cynewulf and the witan deprivedSigeberht of his kingdom, making over to him only the petty principalityof Hampshire, while Cynewulf himself reigned in his stead. After a timeSigeberht murdered an ealdorman of his suite named Cymbra; whereuponCynewulf deprived him of his remaining territory and drove him forthinto the forest of the Weald. There he lived a wild life till a herdsmanmet him in the forest and stabbed him, to avenge the death of hismaster, Cymbra. Cynewulf, in turn, after spending his days in fightingthe Welsh, lost his life in a quarrel with Cyneheard, brother of theoutlawed Sigeberht. He had endeavoured to drive out the ætheling; butCyneheard surprised him at Merton, and slew him with all his thegns, except one Welsh hostage. Next day, the king's friends, headed by theealdorman Osric, fell upon the ætheling, and killed him with all hisfollowers. In the very same year, Æthelbald of Mercia was killedfighting at Seckington; and Offa drove out his successor, Beornred. Ofsuch murders, wars, surprises, and dynastic quarrels, the history ofthe eighth century is full. But no modern reader need know more of themthan the fact that they existed, and that they prove the whollyungoverned and ungovernable nature of the early English temper. 

Until the Danish invasions of the ninth century, the tribal kingdomsstill remained practically separate, and such cohesion as existed wasonly secured for the purpose of temporary defence or aggression. Essexkept its own kings under Æthelberht of Kent; Huiccia retained its royalhouse under Æthelred of Mercia; and later on, Mercia itself had itsealdormen, after the conquest by Ecgberht of Wessex. Each royal linereigned under the supreme power until it died out naturally, like ourown great feudatories in India at the present day. "When Wessex andMercia have worked their way to the rival hegemonies, " says CanonStubbs, "Sussex and Essex do not cease to be numbered among thekingdoms, until their royal houses are extinct. When Wessex hasconquered Mercia and brought Northumbria on its knees, there are stillkings in both Northumbria and Mercia. The royal house of Kent dies out, but the title of King of Kent is bestowed on an ætheling, first of theMercian, then of the West Saxon house. Until the Danish conquest, thedependant royalties seem to have been spared; and even afterwardsorganic union can scarcely be said to exist. "

The final supremacy of the West Saxons was mainly brought about by theDanish invasion. But the man who laid the foundation of the West Saxonpower was Ecgberht, the so-called first king of all England. Banishedfrom Wessex during his youth by one of the constant dynastic quarrels, through the enmity of Offa, the young ætheling had taken refuge withKarl the Great, at the court of Aachen, and there had learnt tounderstand the rising statesmanship of the Frankish race and of therestored Roman empire. The death of his enemy Beorhtric, in 802, leftthe kingdom open to him: but the very day of his accession showed himthe character of the people whom he had come to rule. The men ofWorcester celebrated his arrival by a raid on the men of Wilts. "On thatilk day, " says the Chronicle, "rode Æthelhund, ealdorman of the Huiccias[who were Mercians], over at Cynemæres ford; and there Weohstan theealdorman met him with the Wilts men [who were West Saxons:] and therewas a muckle fight, and both ealdormen were slain, and the Wilts men wonthe day. " For twenty years, Ecgberht was engaged in consolidating hisancestral dominions: but at the end of that time, he found himself ableto attack the Mercians, who had lost Offa six years before Ecgberht'sreturn. In 825, the West Saxons met the Mercian host at Ellandun, "andEcgberht gained the day, and there was muckle slaughter. " Therefore allthe Saxon name, held tributary by the Mercians, gathered about the Saxonchampion. "The Kentish folk, and they of Surrey, and the South Saxons, and the East Saxons turned to him. " In the same year, the East Anglians, anxious to avoid the power of Mercia, "sought Ecgberht for peace and foraid. " Beornwulf, the Mercian king, marched against his revoltedtributaries: but the East Anglians fought him stoutly, and slew him andhis successor in two battles. Ecgberht followed up this step by annexingMercia in 829: after which he marched northward against theNorthumbrians, who at once "offered him obedience and peace; and theythereupon parted. " One year later, Ecgberht led an army against thenorthern Welsh, and "reduced them to humble obedience. " Thus the WestSaxon kingdom absorbed all the others, at least so far as a looseover-lordship was concerned. Ecgberht had rivalled his master Karl byfounding, after a fashion, the empire of the English. But all the localjealousies smouldered on as fiercely as ever, the under-kings retainedtheir several dominions, and Ecgberht's supremacy was merely one ofsuperior force, unconnected with any real organic unity of the kingdomas a whole. Ecgberht himself generally bore the title of King of theWest Saxons, like his ancestors: and though in dealing with his Angliansubjects he styled himself Rex Anglorum, that title perhaps means littlemore than the humbler one of Rex Gewissorum, which he used in addressinghis people of the lesser principality. The real kingdom of the Englishnever existed before the days of Eadward the Elder, and scarcely beforethe days of William the Norman and Henry the Angevin. As to the kingdomof England, that was a far later invention of the feudal lawyers. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. 

In the long period of three and a-half centuries which had elapsedbetween the Jutish conquest of Kent and the establishment of the WestSaxon over-lordship, the politics of Britain had been wholly insular. The island had been brought back by Augustine and his successors intoecclesiastical, commercial, and literary union with the continent: butno foreign war or invasion had ever broken the monotony of murdering theWelsh and harrying the surrounding English. The isolation of England wascomplete. Ship-building was almost an obsolete art: and the small tradewhich still centred in London seems to have been mainly carried on inFrisian bottoms; for the Low Dutch of the continent still retained theseafaring habits which those of England had forgotten. But a new enemywas now beginning to appear in northern Europe–the Scandinavians. Thehistory of the great wicking movement forms the subject of a separatevolume in this series: but the manner in which the English met it willdemand a brief treatment here. Some outline of the bare facts, however, must first be premised. 

As early as 789, during the reign of Offa in Mercia, "three ships ofNorthmen from Hæretha land" came on shore in Wessex. "Then the reeverode against them, and would have driven them to the king's town, for hewist not what they were: and there men slew him. Those were the firstships of Danish men that ever sought English kin's land. " In 795, "theharrying of heathen men wretchedly destroyed God's church at Lindisfarneisle, through rapine and manslaughter. " In the succeeding year, "theheathen harried among the Northumbrians, and plundered Ecgberht'smonastery at Wearmouth. " In 832, "heathen men ravaged Sheppey"; and ayear later, "King Ecgberht fought against the crews of thirty-five shipsat Charmouth, and there was muckle slaughter made, and the Danes heldthe battle-field. "[1] In 835, another host came to the West Welsh (nowalmost reduced to the peninsula of Cornwall): and the Welsh readilyjoined them against their West Saxon over-lord. Ecgberht met the unitedhosts at Hengestesdun and put them both to flight. It was his lastsuccess. In the succeeding year he died, and the kingdom descended tohis weak son, Æthelwulf. His second son, Æthelstan, was placed overKent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex, as under-king. 

 [1] This entry in the Chronicle, however, is probably erroneous, as an exactly similar one occurs under Æthelwulf, seven years later. 

Next spring, the flood of wickings began to pour in earnest overEngland. Thirty-three piratical ships sailed up Southampton Water topillage Southampton, perhaps with an ultimate eye to the treasures ofroyal Winchester, the capital and minster-town of the West Saxonover-lord himself. This was a bold attempt, but the West Saxons met itin full force. The ealdorman Wulfheard gathered together the levy offighting men, attacked the host, and put it to flight with greatslaughter. Shortly after a second Danish host landed near Portland, doubtless to plunder Dorchester: and the local ealdorman Æthelhelm, falling upon them with the levy of Dorset men, was defeated after asharp struggle, leaving the heathen in possession of the field. It wasnot in Wessex, however, that the wickings were to make their greatsuccess. The north had long suffered from terrible anarchy, and was aready prey for any invader. Out of fourteen kings who had reigned inNorthumbria during the eighth century, no less than seven were put todeath and six expelled by their rebellious subjects. ChristianNorthumbria, which in Bæda's days had been the most flourishing part ofBritain, was now reduced to a mere agglomeration of petty princes andclans, dependent on the West Saxon over-lord, and utterly unconnectedwith one another in feeling or sympathy. Already we have seen how theDanes harried Northumbria without opposition. The same was probably thecase with the whole Anglian coast on the east. In 840, the wickings fellon the fen country. "The ealdorman Hereberht was slain by heathen men, and many with him among the marsh-men. " All down the east coast, thepiratical fleet proceeded, burning and slaughtering as it went. "In thesame year, in Lindsey, and in East Anglia, and among the Kent men, manymen were slain by the host. " A year later, the wickings returned, growing bolder as they found out the helplessness of the people. Theysailed up the Thames, and ravaged Rochester and London, with greatslaughter; after which they crossed the channel and fell upon Cwantawic, or Étaples, a commercial port in the Saxon land of the Boulonnais. In842, a Danish host defeated Æthelwulf himself at Charmouth in Dorset;and in the succeeding summer "the ealdorman Eanulf, with the Somersetlevy, and Bishop Ealhstan and the ealdorman Osric, with the Dorset levy, fought at Parretmouth with the host, and made a muckle slaughter, andwon the day. "

The utter weakness of the first English resistance is well shown inthese facts. A terrible flood of heathen savagery was let loose upon thecountry, and the people were wholly unable to cope with it. There wasabsolutely no central organisation, no army, no commissariat, no ships. The heathen host landed suddenly wherever it found the peopleunprepared, and fell upon the larger towns for plunder. The localauthority, the ealdorman or the under-king, hastily gathered togetherthe local levy in arms, and fell upon the pirates tumultuously with themen of the shire as best he might. But he had no provisions for a longcampaign: and when the levy had fought once, it melted away immediately, every man going back again of necessity to his own home. If it won thebattle, it went home to drink over its success: if it lost, itdissolved, demoralized, and left the burghers to fight for their ownwalls, or to buy off the heathen with their own money. But every shireand every kingdom fought for itself alone. If the Dorset men could onlydrive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, they cared littlewhether it sailed away to harry Sussex and Hants. If the Northumbrianscould only drive it away from the Humber, they cared little whether itset sail for the Thames and the Solent. The North Folk of East Angliawere equally happy to send it off toward the South Folk. While there wasso little cohesion between the parts of the same kingdoms, there was nocohesion at all between the different kingdoms over which Æthelwulfexercised a nominal over-lordship. The West Saxon kings fought forDorset and for Kent, but there is no trace of their ever fighting forEast Anglia or for Northumbria. They left their northern vassals to takecare of themselves. "It was never a war between the Danes and thenational army, " says Prof. Pearson, "but between the Danes and a localmilitia. " It would have been impossible, indeed, to resist the wickingseffectually without a strong central system, which could move largearmies rapidly from point to point: and such a system was quite undreamtof in the half-consolidated England of the ninth century. Only war witha foreign invader could bring it about even in a faint degree: and thatwas exactly what the Danish invasion did for Wessex. 

The year 851 marks an important epoch in the English resistance. Theannual horde of wickings had now become as regular in its recurrence assummer itself; and even the inert West Saxon kings began to feel thatpermanent measures must be taken against them. They had built ships, and tried to tackle the invaders in the only way in which so partiallycivilised a race could tackle such tactics as those of the Danes–uponthe sea. A host of wickings came round to Sandwich in Kent. Theunder-king Æthelstan fell upon them with his new navy, and took nine oftheir ships, putting the rest to flight with great slaughter. But in thesame year another great host of 250 sail, by far the largest fleet ofwhich we have yet heard, came to the mouth of the Thames, and therelanded, a step which marks a fresh departure in the wicking tactics. They took Canterbury by assault, and then marched on to London. Therethey stormed the busy merchant town, and put to flight Beorhtwulf, theunder-king of the Mercians, with his local levy. Thence they proceededsouthward into Surrey, doubtless on their way to Winchester. KingÆthelwulf met them at Ockley, with the West-Saxon levy, "and there madethe greatest slaughter among the heathen host that we have yet heard, and gained the day. " In spite of these two great successes, however, both of which show an increasing statesmanship on the part of the WestSaxons, this year was memorable in another way, for "the heathen men forthe first time sat over winter in Thanet. " The loose predatoryexcursions were beginning to take the complexion of regular conquest andpermanent settlement. 

Yet so little did the English still realise the terrible danger of theheathen invasion, that next year Æthelwulf was fighting the Welsh ofWales; and two years after he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, "with greatpomp, and dwelt there twelve months, and then fared homeward. " In thatsame year, "heathen men sat over winter in Sheppey. "

After Æthelwulf's death the English resistance grew fainter and fainter. In 860, under his second son, Æthelberht, a Danish host took Winchesteritself by storm. Five years later, a heathen army settled in Thanet, andthe men of Kent agreed to buy peace of them–the first sign of that evilhabit of buying off the Dane, which grew gradually into a fixed custom. But the host stole away during the truce for collecting the money, andharried all Kent unawares. 

Meanwhile, we hear little of the North. The almost utter destruction ofits records during the heathen domination restricts us for informationto the West Saxon chronicles; and they have little to tell us about anybut their own affairs. In 866, however, we learn that there came a greatheathen host to East Anglia–an organised expedition under twochieftains–"and took winter quarters there, and were horsed; and theEast Anglians made peace with them. " Next year, this permanent hostsailed northward to Humber, and attacked York. The Northumbrians, asusual, were at strife among themselves, two rival kings fighting for thesupremacy. The burghers of York admitted the heathen host within thewalls. Then the rival kings fell upon the town, broke the slenderfortifications, and rushed into the city. The Danes attacked them both, and defeated them with great slaughter. Northumbria passed at once intothe power of the heathen. Their chiefs, Ingvar and Ubba, erected Deirainto a new Danish kingdom, leaving Bernicia to an English puppet; andNorthumbria ceases to exist for the present as a factor in Anglo-Saxonhistory. We must hand it over for sixty years to the Scandinaviandivision of this series. 

In 868, Ingvar and Ubba advanced again into Mercia and beset Nottingham. Then the under-king Burhred called in the aid of his over-lord, Æthelredof Wessex, who came to his assistance with a levy. "But there was nohard fight there, and the Mercians made peace with the host. " In 870, the heathen overran East Anglia, and destroyed the great monastery ofPeterborough, probably the richest religious house in all England. Eadmund, the under-king, came against them with the levy, but they slewhim; and the people held him for a martyr, whose shrine at Bury St. Edmunds grew in after days into the holiest spot in East Anglia. TheDanes harried the whole country, burnt the monasteries, and annexedNorfolk and Suffolk as a second Danish kingdom. East Anglia, too, disappears for a while from our English annals. 

Lastly, the Danes turned against Mercia and Wessex. In 871, a host underBagsecg and Halfdene came to Reading, which belonged to the latterterritory, when the local ealdorman engaged them and won a slightvictory. Shortly afterward the West Saxon king Æthelred, with hisbrother Ælfred, came up, and engaged them a second time with worsesuccess. Three other bloody battles followed, in all of which the Daneswere beaten with heavy loss; but the West Saxons also suffered severely. For three years the host moved up and down through Mercia and Wessex;and the Mercians stood by, aiding neither side, but "making peace withthe host" from time to time. At last, however, in 874, the heathensfinally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself. "The host fared fromLindsey to Repton, and there sat for the winter, and drove King Burhredover sea, two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom; and theysubdued all the land. And Burhred went to Rome, and there settled; andhis body lies in St. Mary's Church, in the school of the English kin. And in the same year they gave the kingdom of Mercia in ward toCeolwulf, an unwise thegn; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostagesthat it should be ready for them on whatso day they willed; and that hewould be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, forthe behoof of the host. " Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while outof our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains. 

This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarilytedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highlyimportant and interesting facts. It is impossible not to be struck withthe extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invadersoverran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states. Wecannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmnessof Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by Ælfred in Wessex. The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of nativeNorthumbrian and Mercian accounts. We might, perhaps, find, had wefuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fightfor their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would leadus to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness ofour authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathenkingdom was established in the pure English land of Bæda and Cuthberht, while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own forever in peninsular and half-Celtic Wessex. 

The difference is doubtless due in part to merely surface causes. EastAnglia had long lost her autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia, was sometimes broken up under several ealdormen. For her and forNorthumbria the conquest was but a change from a West Saxon to a Danishmaster. The house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and tribalorganisation, and was incapable of substituting a central organisationin its place. With no roads and no communications such a centralisingscheme is really impracticable. The disintegrated English kingdoms madelittle show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord. They could accept aDane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon. 

But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper and morefundamental cause underlying the difference. The Scandinavians werenearer to the pure English in blood and speech than they were to theSaxons. In their old home the two races had lived close together, –inSleswick, Jutland, and Scania, –while the Saxons had dwelt furthersouth, near the Frankish border, by the lowlands of the Elbe. To theEnglish of Northumbria, the Saxons of Wessex were almost foreigners. Even at the present day, when the existence of a recognised literarydialect has done so much to obliterate provincial varieties of speech inEngland, a Dorsetshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form theclassical West Saxon of Ælfred, has great difficulty in understanding aYorkshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the classicalNorthumbrian of Bæda. But in the ninth century the differences betweenthe two dialects were probably far greater. On the other hand, thoughDanish and Anglian have widely separated at the present day, and werewidely distinct even in the days of Cnut, it is probable that at thisearlier period they were still, to some extent, mutually comprehensible. Thus, the heathen Scandinavian may have seemed to the Northumbrian andthe East Anglian almost like a fellow-countryman, while the West Saxonseemed in part like an enemy and an intruder. At any rate, thesimilarity of blood and language enabled the two races rapidly tocoalesce; and when the cloud rises again from the North half a centurylater, the distinction of Dane and Englishman has almost ceased in theconquered provinces. It is worthy of note in this connection that thepart of Mercia afterwards given over by Ælfred to Guthrum, was theAnglian half, while the part retained by Wessex was mostly the Saxonhalf–the land conquered by Penda from the West Saxons two hundred yearsbefore. 

Nor must we suppose that this first wave of Scandinavian conquest in anyway swamped or destroyed the underlying English population of the North. The conquerors came merely as a "host, " or army of occupation, not as abody of rural colonists. They left the conquered English in possessionof their homes, though they seized upon the manors for themselves, andkept the higher dignities of the vanquished provinces in their ownhands. Being rapidly converted to Christianity, they amalgamated readilywith the native people. Few women came over with them, and intermarriagewith the English soon broke down the wall of separation. Thearchbishopric of York continued its succession uninterruptedlythroughout the Danish occupation. The Bishops of Elmham lived throughthe stormy period; those of Leicester transferred their see toDorchester-on-the-Thames; those of Lichfield apparently kept up anunbroken series. We may gather that beneath the surface the Northremained just as steadily English under the Danish princes as the wholecountry afterwards remained steadily English under the Norman kings. 

There was, however, one section of the true English race which keptitself largely free from the Scandinavian host. North of the Tyne theDanes apparently spread but sparsely; English ealdormen continued torule at Bamborough over the land between Forth and Tyne. HenceNorthumberland and the Lothians remained more purely English than anyother part of Britain. The people of the South are Saxons: the people ofthe West are half Celts; the people of the North and the Midlands arelargely intermixed with Danes; but the people of the Scottish lowlands, from Forth to Tweed, are almost purely English; and the dialect which wealways describe as Scotch is the strongest, the tersest, and the mostnative modern form of the original Anglo-Saxon tongue. If we wish tofind the truest existing representative of the genuine pure-bloodedEnglish race, we must look for him, not in Mercia or in Wessex, butamongst the sturdy and hard-headed farmers of Tweedside and Lammermoor. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. 

Only one English kingdom now held out against the wickings, and that wasWessex. Its comparatively successful resistance may be set down, in someslight degree, to the energy of a single man, Ælfred, though it wasdoubtless far more largely due to the relatively strong organisation ofthe West Saxon state. In judging of Ælfred, we must lay aside the falsenotions derived from the application of words expressing late ideas toan early and undeveloped stage of civilised society. To call him a greatgeneral or a great statesman is to use utterly misleading terms. Generalship and statesmanship, as we understand them, did not yet exist, and to speak of them in the ninth century in England is to be guilty ofa common, but none the more excusable, anachronism. Ælfred was a sturdyand hearty fighter, and a good king of a semi-barbaric people. As a lad, he had visited Rome; and he retained throughout life a strong sense ofhis own and his people's barbarism, and a genuine desire to civilisehimself and his subjects, so far as his limited lights could carry him. He succeeded to a kingdom overrun from end to end by piratical hordes:and he did his best to restore peace and to promote order. But hischaracter was merely that of a practical, common-sense, fighting WestSaxon, brought up in the camp of his father and brothers, and doing hisrough work in life with the honest straightforwardness of a simple, hard-headed, religious, but only half-educated barbaric soldier. 

The successful East Anglian wickings, under their chief Guthrum, turnedat once to ravage Wessex. They "harried the West Saxons' land, andsettled there, and drove many of the folk over sea. " For awhile itseemed as if Wessex too was to fall into their hands. Ælfred himself, with a little band, "withdrew to the woods and moor-fastnesses. " He tookrefuge in the Somerset marshes, and there occupied a little island ofdry land in the midst of the fens, by name Athelney. Here he threw up arude earthwork, from which he made raids against the Danes, with a pettylevy of the nearest Somerset men. But the mass of the West Saxons werenot disposed to give in so easily. The long border warfare with Devonand Cornwall had probably kept up their organisation in a better statethan that of the anarchic North. The men of Somerset and Wilts, withthose Hampshire men who had not fled to the Continent, gathered at asacred stone on the borders of Selwood Forest, and there Ælfred met themwith his little band. They attacked the host, which they put to flight, and then besieged it in its fortified camp. To escape the siege, Guthrumconsented to leave Wessex, and to accept Christianity. He was baptisedat once, with thirty of his principal chiefs, after the rough-and-readyfashion of the fighting king, near Athelney. The treaty entered intowith Guthrum restored to Ælfred all Wessex, with the south-western partof Mercia, from London to Bedford, and thence along the line of WatlingStreet to Chester. Thus for a time the Saxons recovered their autonomy, and the great Scandinavian horde retired to East Anglia. Æthelred, Ælfred's son-in-law, was appointed under-king of recovered Mercia. Henceforward, Teutonic Britain remains for awhile divided into Wessexand the Denalagu–that is to say, the district governed by Danish law. 

Though peace was thus made with Guthrum, new bodies of wickings camepouring southward from Scandinavia. One of these sailed up the Thames toFulham, but after spending some time there, they went over to theFrankish coast, where their depredations were long and severe. Throughout all Ælfred's reign, with only two intervals of peace, thewickings kept up a constant series of attacks on the coast, andfrequently penetrated inland. From time to time, the great horde underHæsten poured across the country, cutting the corn and driving away thecattle, and retreating into East Anglia, or Northumbria, or thepeninsula of the Wirrall, whenever they were seriously worsted. "Thanksbe to God, " says the Chronicle pathetically "the host had not whollybroken up all the English kin;" but the misery of England must have beenintense. Ælfred, however, introduced two military changes of greatimportance. He set on foot something like a regular army, with asettled commissariat, dividing his forces into two bodies, so thatone-half was constantly at home tilling the soil while the other halfwas in the field; and he built large ships on a new plan, which hemanned with Frisians, as well as with English, and which largely aidedin keeping the coast fairly free from Danish invasion during the twointervals of peace. 

Throughout the whole of the ninth century, however, and the early partof the tenth, the whole history of England is the history of a perpetualpillage. No man who sowed could tell whether he might reap or not. TheEnglishman lived in constant fear of life and goods; he was liable atany moment to be called out against the enemy. Whatever littlecivilisation had ever existed in the country died out almost altogether. The Latin language was forgotten even by the priests. War had turnedeverybody into fighters; commerce was impossible when the towns weresacked year after year by the pirates. But in the rare intervals ofpeace, Ælfred did his best to civilise his people. The amount of workwith which he is credited is truly astonishing. He translated intoEnglish with his own hand "The History of the World, " by Orosius; Bæda's"Ecclesiastical History;" Boethius's "De Consolatione, " and Gregory's"Regula Pastoralis. " At his court, too, if not under his own direction, the English Chronicle was first begun, and many of the sentences quotedfrom that great document in this work are probably due to Ælfredhimself. His devotion to the church was shown by the regularcommunication which he kept up with Rome, and by the gifts which hesent from his impoverished kingdom, not only to the shrine of St. Peterbut even to that of St. Thomas in India. No doubt his vigorouspersonality counted for much in the struggle with the Danes; but hisdeath in 901 left the West Saxons as ready as ever to contend againstthe northern enemy. 

One result of the Danish invasion of Wessex must not be passed over. Thecommon danger seems to have firmly welded together Welshman and Saxoninto a single nationality. The most faithful part of Ælfred's dominionswere the West Welsh shires of Somerset and Devon, with the half Celticfolk of Dorset and Wilts. The result is seen in the change which comesover the relations between the two races. In Ine's laws the distinctionbetween Welshmen and Englishmen is strongly marked; the price of bloodfor the servile population is far less than that of their lords: inÆlfred's laws the distinction has died out. Compared to the heathenDane, West Saxons and West Welsh were equally Englishmen. From that dayto this, the Celtic peasantry of the West Country have utterly forgottentheir Welsh kinship, save in wholly Cymric Cornwall alone. The Devon andSomerset men have for centuries been as English in tongue and feeling asthe people of Kent or Sussex. 

CHAPTER XV. 

THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH. 

The history of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventhconsists entirely of the continued contest between the West Saxons andthe Scandinavians. It falls naturally into three periods. The first isthat of the English reaction, when the West Saxon kings, Eadward andÆthelstan, gradually reconquered the Danish North by inches at a time. The second is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and Eadgar heldtogether the whole of Britain for a while in the hands of a single WestSaxon over-lord. The third is that of the decadence, when, underÆthelred, the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish kings, Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over all England, including even theunconquered Wessex of Ælfred himself. 

At Ælfred's death, his dominions comprised the larger Wessex, from Kentto the Cornish border at Exeter, together with the portion of Merciasouth-west of Watling Street. The former kingdom passed into the handsof his son Eadward; the latter was still held by the ealdorman Æthelred, who had married Ælfred's daughter Æthelflæd. The departure of the Danishhost, led by Hæsten, left the English time to breathe and to recruittheir strength. Henceforth, for nearly a century, the direct wickingincursions cease, and the war is confined to a long struggle with theNorthmen already settled in England. Four years later, the east AnglianDanes broke the peace and harried Mercia and Wessex; but Eadward overrantheir lands in return, and the Kentish men, in a separate battle, attacked and slew Eric their king with several of his earls. In 912, Æthelred the Mercian died, and Eadward at once incorporated London andOxford with his own dominions, leaving his sister Æthelflæd only thenorthern half of her husband's principality. Thenceforth Æthelflæd, "theLady of the Mercians, " turned deliberately to the conquest of the North. She adopted a fresh kind of tactics, which mark again a new departure inthe English policy. Instead of keeping to the old plan of alternateharryings on either side, and precarious tenure of lands from time totime, Æthelflæd began building regular fortresses or _burhs_ all alongher north-eastern frontiers, using these afterwards as bases for freshoperations against the enemy. The spade went hand in hand with thesword: the English were becoming engineers as well as fighters. In theyear of her husband's death, the Lady built _burhs_ at Sarrat andBridgnorth. The next year "she went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the _burh_ there in early summer; and ere Lammas, that atStafford. " In the two succeeding years she set up other strongholds atEddesbury, Warwick, Cherbury, Wardbury, and Runcorn. By 917, she foundherself strong enough to attack Derby, one of the chief cities in theDanish confederacy of the Five Burgs, which she captured after a hardsiege. Thence she turned on Leicester, which capitulated on herapproach, the Danish host going over quietly to her side. She was incommunication with the Danes of York for the surrender of that city, too, when she died suddenly in her royal town of Tamworth, in the year918. 

Meanwhile Eadward had been pushing forward his own boundary in the east, building _burhs_ at Hertford and Witham, and endeavouring to subjugatethe Danish league in Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. In 915, Thurketel, the jarl of Bedford, "sought him for lord, " and Eadwardafterwards built a _burh_ there also. On his sister's death, he annexedall her territories, and then, in a fierce and long doubtful struggle, reconquered not only Huntingdon and Northampton but East Anglia as well. The Christian English hailed him as a deliverer. Next, he turned onStamford, the Danish capital of the Fens, and on Nottingham, thestronghold of the Southumbrian host. In both towns he erected _burhs_. These successes once more placed the West Saxon king in the foremostposition amongst the many rulers of Britain. The smaller principalities, unable to hold their own against the Scandinavians, began spontaneouslyto rally round Eadward as their leader and suzerain. In the same yearwith the conquest of Stamford, "the kings of the North Welsh, Howel, andCledauc, and Jeothwel, and all the North Welsh kin, sought him forlord. " In 923, Eadward pushed further northward, and sent a Mercian hostto conquer "Manchester in Northumbria, " and fortify and man it. A lineof twenty fortresses now girdled the English frontier, from Colchester, through Bedford and Nottingham, to Manchester and Chester. Next year, Eadward himself, now immediate king of all England south of Humber, attacked the last remaining Danish kingdom, Northumbria, throwing abridge across the Trent at Nottingham, and marching against Bakewell inPeakland, where again he built a _burh_. The new tactics were too finefor the rough and ready Danish leaders. Before Eadward reached York, theentire North submitted without a blow. "The king of Scots, and all theScottish kin, and Ragnald [Danish king of York], and the sons of Eadulf[English kings of Bamborough], and all who dwell in Northumbria, as wellEnglish as Danes and Northmen and others, and also the king of theStrathclyde Welsh and all the Strathclyde Welsh, sought him for fatherand for lord. " This was in 924. Next year, Eadward "rex invictus" died, over-lord of all Britain from sea to sea, while the whole country southof the Humber, save only Wales and Cornwall, was now practically unitedinto a single kingdom of England. 

But the seeming submission of the North was fallacious. The Danes hadreintroduced into Britain a fresh mass of incoherent barbarism, whichcould not thus readily coalesce. The Scandinavian leaven in thepopulation had put back the shadow on the dial of England some threecenturies. Æthelstan, Eadward's son, found himself obliged to give hissister in marriage to Sihtric or Sigtrig, Danish king of the YorkshireNorthumbrians, which probably marks a recognition of his vassal'sequality. Soon after, however, Sihtric died, and Æthelstan made himselffirst king of all England by adding Northumbria to his own immediatedominions. Then "he bowed to himself all the kings who were in thisisland; first, Howel, king of the West Welsh; and Constantine, king ofScots; and Owen, king of Gwent [South Wales]; and Ealdred, son ofEaldulf of Bamborough; and with pledge and with oaths sware they peace, and forsook every kind of heathendom. " In the West, he drove the Welshfrom Exeter, which they had till then occupied in common with theEnglish, and fixed their boundary at the Tamar. But once more thepretended vassals rebelled. Constantine, king of Scots, threw off hisallegiance, and Æthelstan thereupon "went into Scotland, both with aland host and a ship host, and harried a mickle deal of it. " In 937, thefeudatories made a final and united effort to throw off the West Saxonyoke. The Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the people of Wales andCornwall, the lords of Bamborough, and the Danes throughout the Northand East, all rose together in a great league against their over-lord. Anlaf, king of the Dublin Danes, came over from Ireland to aid them, with a large body of wickings. The confederates met the West Saxon_fyrd_ or levy at an unknown spot named Brunanburh, where Æthelstanoverthrew them in a crushing defeat, which forms the subject of a finewar-song, inserted in full in the English Chronicle. [1] Three yearslater Æthelstan died, as his father had died before him, undisputedover-lord of all Britain, and immediate king of the whole Teutonicportion. 

 [1] See chapter xx. 

Yet once more the feeble unity of the country broke hopelessly asunder. Eadmund, who succeeded his brother, found the Danes of the North and theMidlands again insubordinate. The year after his accession "theNorthumbrians belied their oath, and chose Anlaf of Ireland for king. "The Five Burgs went too, and the old boundary of Watling Street was oncemore made the frontier of the Danish possessions. In 944, however, Eadmund subdued all Northumbria, and expelled its Danish kings. Hisrecovery of the Five Burgs, and the joy of the Christian Englishinhabitants, are vividly set forth in a fragmentary ballad embedded inthe Chronicle. The next year he harried Strathclyde or Cumberland, theWelsh kingdom between Clyde and Morecambe, and handed it over toMalcolm, king of Scots, as a pledge of his fidelity. At Eadmund's deathin 946–when he was stabbed in his royal hall by an outlaw–his kingdomfell to his brother Eadred. Two years later Northumbria again revolted, and chose Eric for its king. Eadred harried and burnt the province, which he then handed over to an earl of his own creation, one of theBamborough family. The king himself died in 955, and was succeeded byhis nephew Eadwig. But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, andchose Eadwig's brother, Eadgar, instead of their own Danish princes. Eadwig died in 958, and Eadgar then became king of all three provinces;thus finally uniting the whole of Teutonic England into one kingdom. 

Eadgar's reign forms the climax of the West Saxon power. It was, infact, the only period when England can be said to have enjoyed anynational unity under the Anglo-Saxon dynasties. The strong hand of apriest gave peace for some years to the ill-organised mass. Dunstan wasprobably the first Englishman who seriously deserves the name ofstatesman. He was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside thegreat abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones of Arthur, and a gooddeal of the imaginative Celtic temper ran probably with the blood in hisveins. [2] But he was above all the representative of the Romancivilisation in the barbarised, half-Danish England of the tenthcentury. He was a musician, a painter, a reader, and a scholar, in aworld of fierce warriors and ignorant nobles. Eadmund made him abbot ofGlastonbury. Eadgar appointed him first bishop of London, and then, onEadwig's death, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Dunstan who reallyruled England throughout the remainder of his life. Essentially anorganiser and administrator, he was able to weld the unwieldy empireinto a rough unity, which lasted as long as its author lived, and nolonger. He appeased the discontent of Northumbria and the Five Burgs bypermitting them a certain amount of local independence, with theenjoyment of their own laws and their own lawmen. He kept a fleet ofboats cruising in the Irish Sea to check the Danish hosts at Dublin andWaterford. He put forward a code, known as the laws of Eadgar, for thebetter government of Wessex and the South. He made the over-lordship ofthe West Saxons over their British vassals more real than it had everbeen before; and a tale, preserved by Florence, tells us that eighttributary kings rowed Eadgar in his royal barge on the Dee, in token oftheir complete subjection. Internally, Dunstan revived the decliningspirit of monasticism, which had died down during the long struggle withthe Danes, and attempted to reintroduce some tinge of southerncivilisation into the barbarised and half-paganised country in which helived. Wherever it was possible, he "drove out the priests, and setmonks, " and he endeavoured to make the monasteries, which haddegenerated during the long war into mere landowning communities, regainonce more their old position as centres of culture and learning. Duringhis own time his efforts were successful, and even after his death themovement which he had begun continued in this direction to make itselffelt, though in a feebler and less intelligent form. 

 [2] It is impossible to avoid noticing the increased importance of semi-Celtic Britain under Dunstan's administration. He was himself at first an abbot of the old West Welsh monastery of Glastonbury: he promoted West countrymen to the principal posts in the kingdom: and he had Eadgar hallowed king at the ancient West Welsh royal city of Bath, married to a Devonshire lady, and buried at Glastonbury. Indeed, that monastery was under Dunstan what Westminster was under the later kings. Florence uses the strange expression that Eadgar was chosen "by the Anglo-Britons:" and the meeting with the Welsh and Scotch princes in the semi-Welsh town of Chester conveys a like implication. 

One act of Dunstan's policy, however, had far-reaching results, of akind which he himself could never have anticipated. He handed over allNorthumbria beyond the Tweed–the region now known as the Lothians–as afief to Kenneth, king of Scots. This accession of territory whollychanged the character of the Scottish kingdom, and largely promoted theTeutonisation of the Celtic North. The Scottish princes now took uptheir residence in the English town of Edinburgh, and learned to speakthe English language as their mother-tongue. Already Eadmund had madeover Strathclyde or Cumberland to Malcolm; and thus the dominions of theScottish kings extended over the whole of the country now known asScotland, save only the Scandinavian jarldoms of Caithness, Sutherland, and the Isles. Strathclyde rapidly adopted the tongue of its masters, and grew as English in language (though not in blood) as the Lothiansthemselves. Fife, in turn, was quickly Anglicised, as was also the wholeregion south of the Highland line. Thus a new and powerful kingdom arosein the North; and at the same time the cession of an English district tothe Scottish kings had the curious result of thoroughly Anglicising twolarge and important Celtic regions, which had hitherto resisted everyeffort of the Northumbrian or West Saxon over-lords. There is no reasonto believe, however, that this introduction of the English tongue andEnglish manners was connected with any considerable immigration ofTeutonic settlers into the Anglicised tracts. The population ofAyrshire, of Fife, of Perthshire, and of Aberdeen, still shows everysign of Celtic descent, alike in physique, in temperament, and in habitof thought. The change was, in all probability, exactly analogous tothat which we ourselves have seen taking place in Wales, in Ireland, andin the Celtic north of Scotland at the present day. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE AUGUSTAN AGE AND THE LATER ANGLO-SAXON CIVILISATION. 

The slight pause in the long course of Danish warfare which occurredduring the vigorous administration of Dunstan, affords the bestopportunity for considering the degree of civilisation reached by theEnglish in the last age before the Norman Conquest. Our materials forsuch an estimate are partly to be found in existing buildings, manuscripts, pictures, ornaments, and other archæological remains, andpartly in the documentary evidence of the chronicles and charters, andmore especially of the great survey undertaken by the Conqueror'scommissioners, and known as Domesday Book. From these sources we areenabled to gain a fairly complete view of the Anglo-Saxon culture in theperiod immediately preceding the immense influx of Romance civilisationafter the Conquest; and though some such Romance influence was alreadyexerted by the Normanising tendencies of Eadward the Confessor, we mayyet conveniently consider the whole subject here under the age of Eadgarand Æthelred. It is difficult, indeed, to trace any very greatimprovement in the arts of life between the days of Dunstan and the daysof Harold. 

In spite of constant wars and ravages from the northern pirates, therecan be little doubt that England had been slowly advancing in materialcivilisation ever since the introduction of Christianity. The heathenintermixture in the North and the Midlands had retarded the advance buthad not completely checked it; while in Wessex and the South theintercourse with the continent and the consequent growth in culture hadbeen steadily increasing. Æthelwulf of Wessex married a daughter of Karlthe Bald; Ælfred gave his daughter to a count of Flanders; and Eadward'sprincesses were married respectively to the emperor, to the king ofFrance, and to the king of Provence. Such alliances show a considerabledegree of intercourse between Wessex and the Roman world; and the relicsof material civilisation fully bear out the inference. The Institutes ofthe city of London mention traders from Brabant, Liège, Rouen, Ponthieu, France (in the restricted sense), and the Empire; but these came "intheir own vessels. " England, which now has in her hands the carryingtrade of the world, was still dependent for her own supply on foreignbottoms. We know also that officers were appointed to collect tolls fromforeign merchants at Canterbury, Dover, Arundel, and many other towns;and London and Bristol certainly traded on their own account with theContinent. 

As a whole, however, England still remained a purely agriculturalcountry to the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period. It had but littleforeign trade, and what little existed was chiefly confined to importsof articles of luxury (wine, silk, spices, and artistic works) for thewealthier nobles, and of ecclesiastical requisites, such as pictures, incense, relics, vestments, and like southern products for the churchesand monasteries. The exports seem mainly to have consisted of slaves andwool, though hides may possibly have been sent out of the country, and alittle of the famous English gold-work and embroidery was perhaps soldabroad in return for the few imported luxuries. But taking the countryat a glance, we must still picture it to ourselves as composed almostentirely of separate agricultural manors, each now owned by aconsiderable landowner, and tilled mainly by his churls, whose positionhad sunk during the Danish wars to that of semi-servile tenants, owingcustomary rents of labour to their superiors. War had told against theindependence of the lesser freemen, who found themselves compelled tochoose themselves protectors among the higher born classes, till at lastthe theory became general that every man must have a lord. The noblehimself lived upon his manor, accepted service from his churls intilling his own homestead, and allowed them lands in return in theoutlying portions of his estates. His sources of income were two only:first, the agricultural produce of his lands, thus tilled for him byfree labour and by the hands of his serfs; and secondly, the breeding ofslaves, shipped from the ports of London and Bristol for the markets ofthe south. The artisans depended wholly upon their lord, being oftenserfs, or else churls holding on service-tenure. The mass of Englandconsisted of such manors, still largely interspersed with woodland, eachwith the wooden hall of its lord occupying the centre of the homestead, and with the huts of the churls and serfs among the hays and valleys ofthe outskirts. The butter and cheese, bread and bacon, were made athome; the corn was ground in the quern; the beer was brewed and thehoney collected by the family. The spinner and weaver, the shoemaker, smith, and carpenter, were all parts of the household. Thus every manorwas wholly self-sufficing and self-sustaining, and towns were renderedalmost unnecessary. 

Forests and heaths still also covered about half the surface. These werenow the hunting-grounds of the kings and nobles, while in the leys, hursts, and dens, small groups of huts gave shelter to the swineherdsand woodwards who had charge of their lord's property in the woodlands. The great tree-covered region of Selwood still divided Wessex into twohalves; the forest of the Chilterns still spread close to the walls ofLondon; the Peakland was still overgrown by an inaccessible thicket; andthe long central ridge between Yorkshire and Scotland was still shadowedby primæval oaks, pinewoods, and beeches. Agriculture continued to beconfined to the alluvial bottoms, and had nowhere as yet invaded theuplands, or even the stiffer and drier lowland regions, such as theWeald of Kent or the forests of Arden and Elmet. 

Only two elements broke the monotony of these self-sufficingagricultural communities. Those elements were the monasteries and thetowns. 

A large part of the soil of England was owned by the monks. They nowpossessed considerable buildings, with stone churches of somepretensions, in which service was conducted with pomp andimpressiveness. The tiny chapel of St. Lawrence, at Bradford-on-Avon, forms the best example of this primitive Romanesque architecture nowsurviving in England. Around the monasteries stretched their well-tilledlands, mostly reclaimed from fen or forest, and probably morescientifically cultivated than those of the neighbouring manors. Most ofthe monks were skilled in civilised handicrafts, introduced from themore cultivated continent. They were excellent ecclesiasticalmetalworkers; many of them were architects, who built in rude imitationof Romanesque models; and others were designers or illuminators ofmanuscripts. The books and charters of this age are delicately andminutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic elaboration oflater mediæval work. The art of painting (almost always in miniature)was considerably advanced, the figures being well drawn, in rather stiffbut not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective is very imperfectlyunderstood, and hardly ever attempted. Later Anglo-Saxon architecture, such as that of Eadward's magnificent abbey church at Westminster(afterwards destroyed by Henry III. To make way for his own building), was not inferior to continental workmanship. All the arts practised inthe abbeys were of direct Roman origin, and most of the words relatingto them are immediately derived from the Latin. This is the case evenwith terms relating to such common objects as _candle_, _pen_, _wine_, and _oil_. Names of weights, measures, coins, and other exactquantitative ideas are also derived from Roman sources. Carpenters, smiths, bakers, tanners, and millers, were usually attached to theabbeys. Thus, in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, Ripon, Beverley, and Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery grew into the nucleus of aconsiderable town, though the development of such towns is more markedafter than before the Norman Conquest. As a whole, it was by means ofthe monasteries, and especially of their constant interchange of inmateswith the continent, that England mainly kept up the touch with thesouthern civilisation. There alone was Latin, the universal medium ofcontinental intercommunication, taught and spoken. There alone werebooks written, preserved, and read. Through the Church alone was anorganisation kept up in direct communication with the central civilisingagencies of Italy and the south. And while the Church and themonasteries thus preserved the connection with the continent, they alsoformed schools of culture and of industrial arts for the country itself. At the abbeys bells were cast, glass manufactured, buildings designed, gold and silver ornaments wrought, jewels enamelled, and unskilledlabour organised by the most trained intelligence of the land. They thusremained as they had begun, homes and retreats for those exceptionalminds which were capable of carrying on the arts and the knowledge of adying civilisation across the gulf of predatory barbarism whichseparates the artificial culture of Rome from the industrial culture ofmodern Europe. 

The towns were few and relatively unimportant, built entirely of wood(except the churches), and very liable to be burnt down on the leastexcuse. In considering them we must dismiss from our minds the ideasderived from our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselvesmentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiringlittle beyond what was produced on each man's own farm or petty holding. Such people are mainly fed from their own corn and meat, mainly cladfrom their own homespun wool and linen. A little specialisation offunction, however, already existed. Salt was procured from the wyches orpans of the coast, and also from the inland wyches or brine wells ofCheshire and the midland counties. Such names as Nantwich, Middlewych, Bromwich, and Droitwich, still preserve the memory of these earlysaltworks. Iron was mined in the Forest of Dean, around Alcester, and inthe Somersetshire district. The city of Gloucester had six smiths'forges in the days of Eadward the Confessor, and paid its tax to theking in iron rods. Lead was found in Derbyshire, and was largelyemployed for roofing churches. Cloth-weaving was specially carried on atStamford; but as a rule it is probable that every district supplied itsown clothing. English merchants attended the great fair at St. Denys, inFrance, much as those of Central Asia now attend the fair at Kandahar;and madder seems to have been bought there for dyeing cloth. In Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia, herring fisheries already produced considerableresults. With these few exceptions, all the towns were apparently merelocal centres of exchange for produce, and small manufactured wares, like the larger villages or bazaars of India in our own time. Nevertheless, there was a distinct advance towards urban life in thelater Anglo-Saxon period. Bæda mentions very few towns, and most ofthose were waste. By the date of the Conquest there were many, and theirfunctions were such as befitted a more diversified national life. Communications had become far greater; and arts or trade had now to someextent specialised themselves in special places. 

A list of the chief early English towns may possibly seem to give toomuch importance to these very minor elements of English life; yet onemay, perhaps, be appended with due precaution against misapprehension. 

The capital, if any place deserved to be so called under theperambulating early English dynasty, was Winchester (Wintan-ceaster), with its old and new minsters, containing the tombs of the West-Saxonkings. It possessed a large number of craftsmen, doubtless dependantultimately upon the court; and it was relatively a place of far greaterimportance than at any later date. 

The chief ports were London (Lundenbyrig), situated at the head of tidalnavigation on the Thames; and Bristol (Bricgestow) and Gloucester(Gleawan-ceaster), similarly placed on the Avon and Severn. These townswere convenient for early shipping because of their tidal position, atan age when artificial harbours were unknown; They were the seat of theexport traffic in slaves and the import traffic in continental goods. Before Ælfred's reign the carrying trade by sea seems to have been inthe hands of the Frisian skippers and slave-dealers, who stood to theEnglish in the same relation as the Arabs now stand to the East Africanand Central African negroes; but after the increased attention paid toshipbuilding during the struggle with the Danes, English vessels beganto engage in trade on their own account. London must already have beenthe largest and richest town in the kingdom. Even in Bæda's time it was"the mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and land. " It seems, indeed, to have been a sort of merchant commonwealth, governed by itsown port reeve, and it made its own dooms, which have been preserved tothe present day. From the Roman time onward, the position of London as agreat free commercial town was probably uninterrupted. 

York (Eoforwic), the capital of the North, had its own archbishop andits Danish internal organisation. It seems to have been always animportant and considerable town, and it doubtless possessed the samelarge body of handicraftsmen as Winchester. During the doubtful periodof Danish and English struggles, the archbishop apparently exercisedquasi-royal authority over the English burghers themselves. 

Among the cathedral towns the most important were Canterbury(Cant-wara-byrig), the old capital of Kent and metropolis of allEngland, which seems to have contained a relatively large tradingpopulation; Dorchester, in Oxfordshire, first the royal city of the WestSaxons, and afterwards the seat of the exiled bishopric of Lincoln;Rochester (Hrofes-ceaster), the old capital of the West Kentings, andseat of their bishop: and Worcester (Wigorna-ceaster), the chief town ofthe Huiccii. Of the monastic towns the chief were Peterborough (Burh), Ely (Elig), and Glastonbury (Glæstingabyrig). Bath, Amesbury, Colchester, Lincoln, Chester, and other towns of Roman origin were alsoimportant. Exeter, the old capital of the West Welsh, situated at thetidal head of the Exe, had considerable trade. Oxford was a place oftraffic and a fortified town. Hastings, Dover, and the other south-coastports had some communications with France. The only other places of anynote were Chippenham, Bensington, and Aylesbury; Northampton andSouthampton; Bamborough; the fortified posts built by Eadward andÆthelflæd; and the Danish boroughs of Bedford, Derby, Leicester, Stamford, Nottingham, and Huntingdon. The Witena-gemots and the synodstook place in any town, irrespective of size, according to royalconvenience. But as early as the days of Cnut, London was beginning tobe felt as the real centre of national life: and Eadward the Confessor, by founding Westminster Abbey, made it practically the home of thekings. The Conqueror "wore his crown on Eastertide at Winchester; onPentecost at Westminster; and on Midwinter at Gloucester:" whichprobably marks the relative position of the three towns as the chiefplaces in the old West Saxon realm at least. Under Æthelstan, London hadeight moneyers or mint-masters, while Winchester had only six, andCanterbury seven. 

As regards the arts and traffic in the towns, they were chiefly carriedon by guilds, which had their origin, as Dr. Brentano has shown withgreat probability, in separate families, who combined to keep up theirown trade secrets as a family affair. In time, however, the guilds grewinto regular organisations, having their own code of rules and laws, many of which (as at Cambridge, Exeter, and Abbotsbury) we stillpossess. It is possible that the families of craftsmen may at first havebeen Romanised Welsh inhabitants of the cities; for all the oldertowns–London, Canterbury, York, Lincoln, and Rochester–were almostcertainly inhabited without interruption from the Roman period onward. But in any case the guilds seem to have grown out of family compacts, and to have retained always the character of close corporations. Theremust have been considerable division of the various trades even beforethe Conquest, and each trade must have inhabited a separate quarter; forwe find at Winchester, or elsewhere, in the reign of Æthelred, Fellmonger, Horsemonger, Fleshmonger, Shieldwright, Shoewright, Turner, and Salter Streets. 

The exact amount of the population of England cannot be ascertained, even approximately; but we may obtain a rough approximation from theestimates based upon Domesday Book. It seems probable that at the endof the Conqueror's reign, England contained 1, 800, 000 souls. Allowingfor the large number of persons introduced at the Conquest, and for thenatural increase during the unusual peace in the reigns of Cnut, ofEadward the Confessor, and, above all, of William himself, we may guessthat it could not have contained more than a million and a quarter inthe days of Eadgar. London may have had a population of some 10, 000;Winchester and York of 5, 000 each; certainly that of York at the date ofDomesday could not have exceeded 7, 000 persons, and we know that itcontained 1, 800 houses in the time of Eadward the Confessor. 

The organisation of the country continued on the lines of the oldconstitution. But the importance of the simple freeman had now quitedied out, and the gemot was rather a meeting of the earls, bishops, abbots, and wealthy landholders, than a real assembly of the people. Thesub-divisions of the kingdom were now pretty generally conterminous withthe modern counties. In Wessex and the east the counties are eitherolder kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex, and Essex; or else tribal divisionsof the kingdom, like Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey. InMercia, the recovered country is artificially mapped out round the chiefDanish burgs, as in the case of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire, where the countytown usually occupies the centre of the arbitrary shire. In Northumbriait is divided into equally artificial counties by the rivers. Beneaththe counties stood the older organisation of the hundred, and beneaththat again the primitive unit of the township, known on itsecclesiastical side as the parish. In the reign of Eadgar, England seemsto have contained about 3, 000 parish churches. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

THE DECADENCE. 

The death of Dunstan was the signal for the breaking down of theartificial kingdom which he had held together by the mere power of hissolitary organising capacity. Æthelred, the son of Eadgar (who succeededafter the brief reign of his brother Eadward), lost hopelessly all holdover the Scandinavian north. At the same time, the wicking incursions, intermitted for nearly a century, once more recommenced with the samevigour as of old. Even before Dunstan's death, in 980, the piratesravaged Southampton, killing most of the townsfolk; and they alsopillaged Thanet, while another host overran Cheshire. In the succeedingyear, "great harm was done in Devonshire and in Wales;" and a year lateragain, London was burnt and Portland ravaged. In 985, Æthelred, theUnready, as after ages called him, from his lack of _rede_ or counsel, quarrelled with Ælfric, ealdormen of the Mercians, whom he drove oversea. The breach between Mercia and Wessex was thus widened, and as theDanish attacks continued without interruption the redeless king soonfound himself comparatively isolated in his own paternal dominions. Northumbria, under its earl, Uhtred (one of the house of Bamborough), and the Five Burgs under their Danish leaders, acted almostindependently of Wessex throughout the whole of Æthelred's reign. In 991Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, advised that the Danes should bebought off by a payment of ten thousand pounds, an enormous sum; but itwas raised somehow and duly paid. In 992, the command of a naval force, gathered from the merchant craft of the Thames, was entrusted to Ælfric, who had been recalled; and the Mercian leader went over on the eve of anengagement at London to the side of the enemy. Bamborough was stormedand captured with great booty, and the host sailed up Humber mouth. There they stood in the midst of the old Danish kingdom, and found theleading men of Northumbria and Lindsey by no means unfriendly to theirinvasion. In fact, the Danish north was now far more ready to welcomethe kindred Scandinavian than the West Saxon stranger. Æthelred's realmpractically shrank at once to the narrow limits of Kent and Wessex. 

The Danes, however, were by no means content even with these successes. Olaf Tryggvesson, king of Norway, and Swegen Forkbeard, [1] king ofDenmark, fell upon England. The era of mere plundering expeditions andof scattered colonisation had ceased; the era of political conquest hadnow begun. They had determined upon the complete subjugation of allEngland. In 994 Olaf and Swegen attacked London with 94 ships, but wereput to flight by a gallant resistance of the townsmen, who did "moreharm and evil than ever they weened that any burghers could do them. "Thence the host sailed away to Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, burning and slaying all along the coast as they went. Æthelred and hiswitan bought them off again, with the immense tribute of sixteenthousand pounds. The host accepted the terms, but settled down for thewinter at Southampton–a sufficient indication of theirintentions–within easy reach of Winchester itself; and there "they fedfrom all the West Saxons' land. " Æthelred was alarmed, and sent to Olaf, who consented to meet him at Andover. There the king received him "withgreat worship, " and gifted him with kinglike gifts, and sent him awaywith a promise never again to attack England. Olaf kept his word, andreturned no more. But still Swegen remained, and went on pillagingDevonshire and Cornwall, wending into Tamar mouth as far as Lidford, where his men "burnt and slew all that they found. " Thence they betookthemselves to the Frome, and so up into Dorset, and again to Wight. In999, on the eve of doomsday as men then thought, they sailed up Thamesand Medway, and attacked Rochester. The men of Kent stoutly fought them, but, as usual, without assistance from other shires; and the Danes tookhorses, and rode over the land, almost ruining all the West Kentings. The king and his witan resolved to send against them a land fyrd and aship fyrd or raw levy. But the spirit of the West Saxons was broken, andthough the craft were gathered together, yet in the end, as theChronicle plaintively puts it, "neither ship fyrd nor land fyrd wroughtanything save toil for the folk, and the emboldening of their foes. "

 [1] See Mr. York-Powell's "Scandinavian Britain. "

So, year after year, the endless invasion dragged on its course, andeverywhere each shire of Wessex fought for itself against such enemiesas happened to attack it. At last, in the year 1002, Æthelred once morebought off the fleet, this time with 24, 000 pounds; and some of theDanes obtained leave to settle down in Wessex. But on St. Brice's day, the king treacherously gave orders that all Danes in the immediateEnglish territory should be massacred. The West Saxons rose on theappointed night, and slew every one of them, including Gunhild, thesister of King Swegen, and a Christian convert. It was a foolhardyattempt. Swegen fell at once upon Wessex, and marched up and down thewhole country, for two years. He burnt Wilton and Sarum, and then sailedround to Norwich, where Ulfkytel, of East Anglia, gave him "the hardesthand-play" that he had ever known in England. A year of famineintervened; but in 1006 Swegen returned again, harrying and burningSandwich. All autumn the West Saxon fyrd waited for the enemy, but inthe end "it came to naught more than it had oft erst done. " The hosttook up quarters in Wight, marched across Hants and Berks to Reading, and burned Wallingford. Thence they returned with their booty to thefleet, by the very walls of the royal city. "There might the Winchesterfolk behold an insolent host and fearless wend past their gate to sea. "The king himself had fled into Shropshire. The tone of utter despairwith which the Chronicle narrates all these events is the best measureof the national degradation. "There was so muckle awe of the host, " saysthe annalist, "that no man could think how man could drive them fromthis earth or hold this earth against them; for that they had cruellymarked each shire of Wessex with burning and with harrying. " The Englishhad sunk into hopeless misery, and were only waiting for a strong ruleto rescue them from their misery. 

The strong rule came at last. Thorkell, a Danish jarl, marched allthrough Wessex, and for three years more his host pillaged everywhere inthe South. In 1011, they killed Ælfheah, the archbishop of Canterbury, at Greenwich. When the country was wholly weakened, Swegen turnedsouthward once more, this time with all Northumbria and Mercia at hisback. In 1013 he sailed round to Humber mouth, and thence up the Trent, to Gainsborough. "Then Earl Uhtred and all Northumbrians soon bowed tohim, and all the folk in Lindsey; and sithence the folk of the FiveBurgs, and shortly after, all the host by north of Watling-street; andmen gave him hostages of each shire. " Swegen at once led the united armyinto England, leaving his son Cnut in Denalagu with the ships andhostages. He marched to Oxford, which received him; then to the royalcity of Winchester, which made no resistance. At London Æthelred waswaiting; and for a time the town held out. So Swegen marched westward, and took Bath. There, the thegns of the Welsh-kin counties–Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall–bowed to him and gave him hostages. "Whenhe had thus fared, he went north to his ships, and all the folk held himthen as full king. " London itself gave way. Æthelred fled to Wight, andthence to Normandy. He had married Ymma, the daughter of Richard theFearless; and he now took refuge with her brother, Richard the Good. 

Next year Swegen died, and the West Saxon witan sent back for Æthelred. No lord was dearer to them, they said, than their lord by kin. But thehost had already chosen Cnut; and the host had a stronger claim than thewitan. For two years Æthelred carried on a desultory war with theintruders, and then died, leaving it undecided. His son Eadmund, nicknamed Ironside, continued the contest for a few months; but in theautumn of 1016 he died–poisoned, the English said, by Cnut–and Cnutsucceeded to undisputed sway. He at once assumed Wessex as his ownpeculiar dominion, and the political history of the English ends for twocenturies. Their social life went on, of course, as ever; but it was thelife of a people in strict subjection to foreign rulers–Danish, Norman, or Angevin. The story of the next twenty-five years at least belongs tothe chronicles of Scandinavian Britain. 

At the end of that time, however, there was a slight reaction. Cnut andhis sons had bound the kingdom roughly into one; and the death ofHarthacnut left an opportunity for the return of a descendant of Ælfred. But the English choice fell upon one who was practically a foreigner. Eadward, son of Æthelred by Ymma of Normandy, had lived in his mother'scountry during the greater part of his life. Recalled by Earl Godwineand the witan, he came back to England a Norman, rather than anEnglishman. The administration remained really in the hands of Godwinehimself, and of the Danish or Danicised aristocracy. But Mercia andNorthumbria still stood apart from Wessex, and once procured the exileof Godwine himself. The great earl returned, however, and at his deathpassed on his power to his son Harold, a Danicised Englishman of greatrough ability, such as suited the hard times on which he was cast. Harold employed the lifetime of Eadward, who was childless, in preparingfor his own succession. The king died in 1066, and Harold was quietlychosen at once by the witan. He was the last Englishman who ever satupon the throne of England. 

The remaining story belongs chiefly to the annals of Norman Britain. Harold was assailed at once from either side. On the north, his brotherTostig, whom he had expelled from Northumbria, led against him hisnamesake, Harold Hardrada, king of Norway. On the south, William ofNormandy, Eadward's cousin, claimed the right to present himself to theEnglish electors. Eadward's death, in fact, had broken up the temporarystatus, and left England once more a prey to barbaric Scandinavians fromDenmark, or civilised Scandinavians from Normandy. The Englishthemselves had no organisation which could withstand either, and nonational unity to promote such organisation in future. Harold of Norwaycame first, landing in the old Danish stronghold of Northumbria; and theEnglish Harold hurried northward to meet him, with his little body ofhouse-carls, aided by a large fyrd which he had hastily collected to useagainst William. At Stamford-bridge he overthrew the invaders with greatslaughter, Harold Hardrada and Tostig being amongst the slain. Meanwhile, William had crossed to Pevensey, and was ravaging the coast. Harold hurried southward, and met him at Senlac, near Hastings. After ahard day's fight, the Normans were successful, and Harold fell. But evenyet the English could not agree among themselves. In this crisis of thenational fate, the local jealousies burnt up as fiercely as ever. WhileWilliam was marching upon London, the witan were quarrelling andintriguing in the city over the succession. "Archbishop Ealdred and thetownsmen of London would have Eadgar Child, "–a grandson of EadmundIronside–"for king, as was his right by kin. " But Eadwine and Morkere, the representatives of the great Mercian family of Leofric, had hopesthat they might turn William's invasion to their own good, and securetheir independence in the north by allowing Wessex to fall unassistedinto his hands. After much shuffling, Eadgar was at last chosen forking. "But as it ever should have been the forwarder, so was it ever, from day to day, slower and worse. " No resistance was organised. In themidst of all this turmoil, the Peterborough Chronicler is engaged innarrating the petty affairs of his own abbey, and the question whicharose through the application made to Eadgar for his consent to theappointment of an abbot. In such a spirit did the English meet aninvasion from the stoutest and best organised soldiery in Europe. William marched on without let or hindrance, and on his way, theLady–the Confessor's widow–surrendered the royal city of Winchesterinto his hands. The duke reached the Thames, burnt Southwark, and thenmade a détour to cross the river at Wallingford, whence he proceededinto Hertfordshire, thus cutting off Eadwine and Morkere in London fromtheir earldoms. The Mercian and Northumbrian leaders being determined tohold their own at all hazards, retreated northward; and the Englishresistance crumbled into pieces. Eadgar, the rival king, with Ealdred, the archbishop, and all the chief men of London, came out to meetWilliam, and "bowed to him for need. " The Chronicler can only say thatit was very foolish they had not done so before. A people so helpless, so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergoa severe training from the hard taskmasters of Romance civilisation. Thenation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled inthe stern school of the conquerors. For awhile, it is true, Williamgoverned England like an English king; but the constant rebellion andfaithlessness of his new subjects drove him soon to severer measures;and the great insurrection of 1068, with its results, put the wholecountry at his feet in a very different sense from the battle of Senlac. For a hundred and fifty years, the English people remained a mere raceof chapmen and serfs; and the English language died down meanwhile intoa servile dialect. When the native stock emerges again into the fulllight of history, by the absorption of the Norman conquerors in thereign of John, it reappears with all the super-added culture andorganisation of the Romance nationalities. The Conquest was aninevitable step in the work of severing England from the barbarousNorth, and binding it once more in bonds of union with the civilisedSouth. It was the necessary undoing of the Danish conquest; more still, it was an inevitable step in the process whereby England itself was tobegin its unified existence by the final breaking down of the barrierswhich divided Wessex from Mercia, and Mercia from Northumbria. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 

A description of Anglo-Saxon Britain, however brief, would not becomplete without some account of the English language in its earliestand purest form. But it would be impossible within reasonable limits togive anything more than a short general statement of the relation whichthe old English tongue bears to the kindred Teutonic dialects, and ofthe main differences which mark it off from our modern simplified andmodified speech. All that can be attempted here is such a broad outlineas may enable the general reader to grasp the true connexion betweenmodern English and so-called Anglo-Saxon, on the one hand, as well asbetween Anglo-Saxon itself and the parent Teutonic language on theother. Any full investigation of grammatical or etymological detailswould be beyond the scope of this little volume. 

The tongue spoken by the English and Saxons at the period of theirinvasion of Britain was an almost unmixed Low Dutch dialect. Originallyderived, of course, from the primitive Aryan language, it had alreadyundergone those changes which are summed up in what is known as Grimm'sLaw. The principal consonants in the old Aryan tongue had beenregularly and slightly altered in certain directions; and thesealterations have been carried still further in the allied High Germanlanguage. Thus the original word for _father_, which closely resembledthe Latin _pater_, becomes in early English or Anglo-Saxon _fæder_, andin modern High German _vater_. So, again, among the numerals, our _two_, in early English _twa_, answers to Latin _duo_ and modern High German_zwei_; while our _three_, in old English _threo_, answers to Latin_tres_, and modern High German _drei_. So far as these permutations areconcerned, Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin may be regarded as most nearlyresembling the primitive Aryan speech, and with them the Celtic dialectsmainly agree. From these, the English varies one degree, the High Germantwo. The following table represents the nature of such changesapproximately for these three groups of languages:–

-----------------+------------+---------------+---------------+Greek, Sanscrit, | | | |Latin, Celtic | p. B. F. | t. D. Th. | k. G. Ch. |-----------------+------------+---------------+---------------+Gothic, English, | | | |Low Dutch | f. P. B. | th. T. D. | ch. K. G. |-----------------+------------+---------------+---------------+ | | | |High German | b. F. P. | d. Th. T. | g. Ch. K. |-----------------+------------+---------------+---------------+

In practice, several modifications arise; for example, the law is onlytrue for old High German, and that only approximately, but its generaltruth may be accepted as governing most individual cases. 

Judged by this standard, English forms a dialect of the Low Dutch branchof the Aryan language, together with Frisian, modern Dutch, and theScandinavian tongues. Within the group thus restricted its affinitiesare closest with Frisian and old Dutch, less close with Icelandic andDanish. While the English still lived on the shores of the Baltic, it isprobable that their language was perfectly intelligible to the ancestorsof the people who now inhabit Holland, and who then spoke very slightlydifferent local dialects. In other words, a single Low Dutch speech thenapparently prevailed from the mouth of the Elbe to that of the Scheldt, with small local variations; and from this speech the Anglo-Saxon andthe modern English have developed in one direction, while the Dutch hasdeveloped in another, the Frisian dialect long remaining intermediatebetween them. Scandinavian ceased, perhaps, to be intelligible toEnglishmen at an earlier date, the old Icelandic being already markedoff from Anglo-Saxon by strong peculiarities, while modern Danishdiffers even more widely from the spoken English of the present day. 

The relation of Anglo-Saxon to modern English is that of directparentage, it might almost be said of absolute identity. The language of_Beowulf_ and of Ælfred is not, as many people still imagine, adifferent language from our own; it is simply English in its earliestand most unmixed form. What we commonly call Anglo-Saxon, indeed, ismore English than what we commonly call English at the present day. Thefirst is truly English, not only in its structure and grammar, but alsoin the whole of its vocabulary: the second, though also truly Englishin its structure and grammar, contains a large number of Latin, Greek, and Romance elements in its vocabulary. Nevertheless, no break separatesus from the original Low Dutch tongue spoken in the marsh lands ofSleswick. The English of _Beowulf_ grows slowly into the English ofÆlfred, into the English of Chaucer, into the English of Shakespeare andMilton, and into the English of Macaulay and Tennyson. 

Old words drop out from time to time, old grammatical forms die away orbecome obliterated, new names and verbs are borrowed, first from theNorman-French at the Conquest, then from the classical Greek and Latinat the Renaissance; but the continuity of the language remains unbroken, and its substance is still essentially the same as at the beginning. TheCornish, the Irish, and to some extent the Welsh, have left off speakingtheir native tongues, and adopted the language of the dominant Teuton;but there never was a time when Englishmen left off speaking Anglo-Saxonand took to English, Norman-French, or any other form of speechwhatsoever. 

An illustration may serve to render clearer this fundamental andimportant distinction. If at the present day a body of Englishmen wereto settle in China, they might learn and use the Chinese names for manynative plants, animals, and manufactured articles; but however many ofsuch words they adopted into their vocabulary, their language wouldstill remain essentially English. A visitor from England would have tolearn a number of unfamiliar words, but he would not have to learn a newlanguage. If, on the other hand, a body of Frenchmen were to settle in aneighbouring Chinese province, and to adopt exactly the same Chinesewords, their language would still remain essentially French. Thedialects of the two settlements would contain many words in common, butneither of them would be a Chinese dialect on that account. Just so, English since the Norman Conquest has grafted many foreign words uponthe native stock; but it still remains at bottom the same language as inthe days of Eadgar. 

Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon differs so far in externals from modernEnglish, that it is now necessary to learn it systematically withgrammar and dictionary, in somewhat the same manner as one would learn aforeign tongue. Most of the words, indeed, are more or less familiar, atleast so far as their roots are concerned; but the inflexions of thenouns and verbs are far more complicated than those now in use: and manyobsolete forms occur even in the vocabulary. On the other hand theidioms closely resemble those still in use; and even where a root hasnow dropped out of use, its meaning is often immediately suggested bythe cognate High German word, or by some archaic form preserved for usin Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton, as well as by occasional survival inthe Lowland Scotch and other local dialects. 

English in its early form was an inflexional language; that is to say, the mutual relations of nouns and of verbs were chiefly expressed, notby means of particles, such as _of_, _to_, _by_, and so forth, but bymeans of modifications either in the termination or in the body of theroot itself. The nouns were declined much as in Greek and Latin; theverbs were conjugated in somewhat the same way as in modern French. Every noun had gender expressed in its form. 

The following examples will give a sufficient idea of the commoner formsof declension in the classical West Saxon of the time of Ælfred. Thepronunciation has already been briefly explained in the preface. 

 SING. PLUR. 

(1. ) _Nom. _ stan (_a stone_). _Nom. _ stanas. _Gen. _ stanes. _Gen. _ stana. _Dat. _ stane. _Dat. _ stanum. _Acc. _ stan. _Acc. _ stanas. 

This is the commonest declension for masculine nouns, and it has fixedthe normal plural for the modern English. 

 SING. PLUR. 

(2. ) _Nom. _ fot (_a foot_). _Nom. _ fet. _Gen. _ fotes. _Gen. _ fota. _Dat. _ fet. _Dat. _ fotum. _Acc. _ fot. _Acc. _ fet. 

Hence our modified plurals, such as _feet_, _teeth_, and _men_. 

 SING. PLUR. 

(3. ) _Nom. _ wudu (_a wood_). _Nom. _ wuda. _Gen. _ wuda. _Gen. _ wuda. _Dat. _ wuda. _Dat. _ wudum. _Acc. _ wudu. _Acc. _ wuda. 

All these are for masculine nouns. 

The commonest feminine declension is as follows:–

 SING. PLUR. 

(4. ) _Nom. _ gifu (_a gift_). _Nom. _ gifa. _Gen. _ gife. _Gen. _ gifena. _Dat. _ gife. _Dat. _ gifum. _Acc. _ gife. _Acc. _ gifa. 

Less frequent is the modified form:

 SING. PLUR. 

(5. ) _Nom. _ boc (_a book_). _Nom. _ bec. _Gen. _ bec. _Gen. _ boca. _Dat. _ bec. _Dat. _ bocum. _Acc. _ boc. _Acc. _ bec. 

Of neuters there are two principal declensions. The first has the pluralin _u_; the second leaves it unchanged. 

 SING. PLUR. 

(6. ) _Nom. _ scip (_a ship_). _Nom. _ scipu. _Gen. _ scipes. _Gen. _ scipa. _Dat. _ scipe. _Dat. _ scipum. _Acc. _ scip. _Acc. _ scipu. 

 SING. PLUR. 

(7. ) _Nom. _ hus (_a house_). _Nom. _ hus. _Gen. _ huses. _Gen. _ husa. _Dat. _ huse. _Dat. _ husum. _Acc. _ hus. _Acc. _ hus. 

Hence our "collective" plurals, such as _fish_, _deer_, _sheep_, and_trout_. 

There is also a weak declension, much the same for all three genders, ofwhich the masculine form runs as follows:–

 SING. PLUR. 

_Nom. _ guma (_a man_). _Nom. _ guman. _Gen. _ guman. _Gen. _ gumena. _Dat. _ guman. _Dat. _ guman. _Acc. _ guman. _Acc. _ guman. 

Adjectives are declined throughout, as in Latin, through all the cases(including an instrumental), numbers, and genders. The demonstrativepronoun or definite article _se_ (the) may stand as an example. 

 SING. 

 Masc. Fem. Neut. _Nom. _ se, seo, thæt. _Gen. _ thæs, thære, thæs. _Dat. _ tham, thære, tham. _Acc. _ thone, tha, thæt. _Inst. _ thy, thære, thy. 

 PLUR. 

 Masc. Fem. Neut. _Nom. _ tha. _Gen. _ thara. _Dat. _ tham. _Acc. _ tha. _Inst. _ --

Verbs are conjugated about as fully as in Latin. There are two principalforms: strong verbs, which form their preterite by vowel modification, as _binde_, pret. _band_; and weak verbs, which form it by the additionof _ode_ or _de_ to the root, as _lufige_, pret. _lufode_; _hire_, pret. _hirde_. The present and preterite of the first form are as follows:–

 IND. SUBJ. 

_Pres. Sing. _ 1. Binde. Binde. 2. Bindest. Binde. 3. Bindeth. Binde. 

_plur. _ 1, 2, 3. Bindath. Binden. 

_Pret. Sing. _ 1. Band. Bunde. 2. Bunde. Bunde. 3. Band. Bunde. 

_plur. _ 1, 2, 3. Bundon. Bunden. 

Both the grammatical forms and still more the orthography vary much fromtime to time, from place to place, and even from writer to writer. Theforms used in this work are for the most part those employed by WestSaxons in the age of Ælfred. 

A few examples of the language as written at three periods will enablethe reader to form some idea of its relation to the existing type. Thefirst passage cited is from King Ælfred's translation of Orosius; but itconsists of the opening lines of a paragraph inserted by the kinghimself from his own materials, and so affords an excellent illustrationof his style in original English prose. The reader is recommended tocompare it word for word with the parallel slightly modernised version, bearing in mind the inflexional terminations. 

Ohthere sæde his hlaforde, | Othhere said [to] his lord, Ælfrede cyninge, thæt he | Ælfred king, that he of allealra Northmonna northmest | Northmen northmost abode. Bude. He cwæth thæt he | He quoth that he abodebude on thæm lande northweardum | on the land northward againstwith tha West-sæ. | the West Sea. He said, He sæde theah thæt thæt land | though, that that land wassie swithe lang north thonan; | [or extended] much northac hit is eall weste, buton on | thence; eke it is all waste, feawum stowum styccemælum | but [except that] on few stowswiciath Finnas, on huntothe | [in a few places] piecemealon wintra, and on sumera on | dwelleth Finns, on hunting onfiscathe be thære sæ. He | winter, and on summer onsæde thæt he æt sumum cirre | fishing by the sea. He saidwolde fandian hu longe thæt | that he at some time [on oneland northryhte læge, oththe | occasion] would seek how longhwæther ænig monn be northan | that land lay northright [duethæm westenne bude. Tha | north], or whether any man byfor he northryhte be thæm | north of the waste abode. Lande: let him ealne weg | Then fore [fared] he northright, thæt weste land on thæt steorbord, | by the land: left all theand tha wid-sæ on thæt | way that waste land on thebæcbord thrie dagas. Tha | starboard of him, and the widewæs he swa feor north swa tha | sea on the backboard [port, hwæl-huntan firrest farath. | French _babord_] three days. | Then was he so far north as | the whale-hunters furthest | fareth. 

In this passage it is easy to see that the variations which make it intomodern English are for the most part of a very simple kind. Some of thewords are absolutely identical, as _his_, _on_, _he_, _and_, _land_, or_north_. Others, though differences of spelling mask the likeness, arepractically the same, as _sæ_, _sæde_, _cwæth_, _thæt_, _lang_, forwhich we now write _sea_, _said_, _quoth_, _that_, _long_. A few haveundergone contraction or alteration, as _hlaford_, now _lord_, _cyning_, now _king_, and _steorbord_, now _starboard_. _Stow_, a place, is nowobsolete, except in local names; _styccemælum_, stickmeal, has beenNormanised into _piecemeal_. In other cases new terminations have beensubstituted for old ones; _huntath_ and _fiscath_ are now replaced by_hunting_ and _fishing_; while _hunta_ has been superseded by _hunter_. Only six words in the passage have died out wholly: _buan_, to abide(_bude_); _swithe_, very; _wician_, to dwell; _cirr_, an occasion;_fandian_, to enquire (connected with _find_); and _bæcbord_, port, which still survives in French from Norman sources. _Dæg_, day, and_ænig_, any, show how existing English has softened the final _g_ into a_y_. But the main difference which separates the modern passage from itsancient prototype is the consistent dropping of the grammaticalinflexions in _hlaforde_, _Ælfrede_, _ealra_, _feawum_, and _fandian_, where we now say, _to his lord_, _of all_, _in few_, and _to enquire_. 

The next passage, from the old English epic of _Beowulf_, shows thelanguage in another aspect. Here, as in all poetry, archaic formsabound, and the syntax is intentionally involved. It is written in theold alliterative rhythm, described in the next chapter:–

 Beowulf mathelode bearn Ecgtheowes; Hwæt! we the thas sæ-lac sunu Healfdenes Leod Scyldinga lustum brohton, Tires to tacne, the thu her to-locast. Ic thæt un-softe ealdre gedigde Wigge under wætere, weore genethde Earfothlice; æt rihte wæs Guth getwæfed nymthe mec god scylde. 

 * * * * *

 Beowulf spake, the son of Ecgtheow: See! We to thee this sea-gift, son of Healfdene, Prince of the Scyldings, joyfully have brought, For a token of glory, that thou here lookest on. That I unsoftly, gloriously accomplished, In war under water: the work I dared, With much labour: rightly was The battle divided, but that a god shielded me. 

Or, to translate more prosaically:–

"Beowulf, the son of Ecgtheow, addressed the meeting. See, son ofHealfdene, Prince of the Scyldings; we have joyfully brought thee thisgift from the sea which thou beholdest, for a proof of our valour. Iobtained it with difficulty, gloriously, fighting beneath the waves: Idared the task with great toil. Evenly was the battle decreed, but thata god afforded me his protection. "

In this short passage, many of the words are now obsolete: for example, _mathelian_, to address an assembly (_concionari_); _lac_, a gift;_wig_, war; _guth_, battle; and _leod_, a prince. _Ge-digde_, _ge-nethde_, and _ge-twæfed_ have the now obsolete particle _ge_-, whichbears much the same sense as in High German. On the other hand, _bearn_, a bairn; _sunu_, a son; _sæ_, sea; _tacen_, a token; _wæter_, water; and_weorc_, work, still survive: as do the verbs _to bring_, _to look_, and_to shield_. _Lust_, pleasure, whence _lustum_, joyfully, has nowrestricted its meaning in modern English, but retains its original sensein High German. 

A few lines from the "Chronicle" under the year 1137, during the reignof Stephen, will give an example of Anglo-Saxon in its later and corruptform, caught in the act of passing into Chaucerian English:–

This gære for the King | This year fared the KingStephan ofer sæ to Normandi; | Stephen over sea to Normandy;and ther wes under | and there he wasfangen, forthi thæt hi wenden | accepted [received as duke]thæt he sculde ben alsuic alse | because that they weenedthe eom wæs, and for he | that he should be just as hishadde get his tresor; ac he | uncle was, and because hetodeld it and scatered sotlice. | had got his treasure: but heMicel hadde Henri king | to-dealt [distributed] andgadered gold and sylver, and | scattered it sot-like [foolishly]. Na god ne dide men for his | Muckle had Kingsaule tharof. Tha the King | Henry gathered of gold andStephan to Englaland com, | silver; and man did no goodtha macod he his gadering | for his soul thereof. Whenæt Oxeneford, and thar he | that King Stephan was comenam the biscop Roger of | to England, then maked heSereberi, and Alexander | his gathering at Oxford, andbiscop of Lincoln, and the | there he took the bishopCanceler Roger, hise neves, | Roger of Salisbury, and Alexander, and dide ælle in prisun, til | bishop of Lincoln, andhi iafen up hire castles. | the Chancellor Roger, his | nephew, and did them all in | prison [put them in prison] | till they gave up their castles. 

The following passage from Ælfric's Life of King Oswold, in the bestperiod of early English prose, may perhaps be intelligible to modernreaders by the aid of a few explanatory notes only. _Mid_ means _with_;while _with_ itself still bears only the meaning of _against_:–

"Æfter tham the Augustinus to Englalande becom, wæs sum æthele cyning, Oswold ge-haten [_hight_ or _called_], on North-hymbra-lande, ge-lyfedswithe on God. Se ferde [went] on his iugothe [youth] fram his freondumand magum [relations] to Scotlande on sæ, and thær sona wearth ge-fullod[baptised], and his ge-feran [companions] samod the mid him sithedon[journeyed]. Betwux tham wearth of-slagen [off-slain] Eadwine his eam[uncle], North-hymbra cyning, on Crist ge-lyfed, fram Brytta cyninge, Ceadwalla ge-ciged [called, named], and twegen his æfter-gengan binnantwam gearum [years]; and se Ceadwalla sloh and to sceame tucode thaNorth-hymbran leode [people] æfter heora hlafordes fylle, oth thæt[until] Oswold se eadiga his yfelnysse adwæscte [extinguished]. Oswoldhim com to, and him cenlice [boldly] with feaht mid lytlum werode[troop], ac his geleafa [belief] hine ge-trymde [encouraged], and Cristhim ge-fylste [helped] to his feonda [fiends, enemies] slege. "

It will be noticed in every case that the syntactical arrangement of thewords in the sentences follows as a whole the rule that the governedword precedes the governing, as in Latin or High German, not _viceversa_, as in modern English. 

A brief list will show the principal modifications undergone by nouns inthe process of modernisation. _Stan_, stone; _snaw_, snow; _ban_, bone. _Cræft_, craft; _stæf_, staff; _bæc_, back. _Weg_, way; _dæg_, day;_nægel_, nail; _fugol_, fowl. _Gear_, year; _geong_, young. _Finger_, finger; _winter_, winter; _ford_, ford. _Æfen_, even; _morgen_, morn. _Monath_, month; _heofon_, heaven; _heafod_, head. _Fot_, foot; _toth_, tooth; _boc_, book; _freond_, friend. _Modor_, mother; _fæder_, father;_dohtor_, daughter. _Sunu_, son; _wudu_, wood; _caru_, care; _denu_, dene (valley). _Scip_, ship; _cild_, child; _ceorl_, churl; _cynn_, kin;_ceald_, cold. Wherever a word has not become wholly obsolete, orassumed a new termination, (_e. G. _, _gifu_, gift; _morgen_, morn-ing), it usually follows one or other of these analogies. 

The changes which the English language, as a whole, has undergone inpassing from its earlier to its later form, may best be considered underthe two heads of form and matter. 

As regards form or structure, the language has been simplified in threeseparate ways. First, the nouns and adjectives have for the most partlost their inflexions, at least so far as the cases are concerned. Secondly, the nouns have also lost their gender. And thirdly, the verbshave been simplified in conjugation, weak preterites being oftensubstituted for strong ones, and differential terminations largely lost. On the other hand, the plural of nouns is still distinguished from thesingular by its termination in _s_, which is derived from the firstdeclension of Anglo-Saxon nouns, not as is often asserted, from theNorman-French usage. In other words, all plurals have been assimilatedto this the commonest model; just as in French they have beenassimilated to the final _s_ of the third declension in Latin. A fewplurals of the other types still survive, such as _men_, _geese_, _mice_, _sheep_, _deer_, _oxen_, _children_ and (dialectically)_peasen_. To make up for this loss of inflexions, the language nowemploys a larger number of particles, and to some extent, ofauxiliaries. Instead of _wines_, we now say _of a friend_; instead of_wine_, we now say _to a friend_; and instead of _winum_, we now say _tofriends_. English, in short, has almost ceased to be inflexional and hasbecome analytic. 

As regards matter or vocabulary, the language has lost in certaindirections, and gained in others. It has lost many old Teutonic roots, such as _wig_, war; _rice_, kingdom; _tungol_, light; with theirderivatives, _wigend_, warrior; _rixian_, to rule; _tungol-witega_, astrologer; and so forth. The relative number of such losses to thesurvivals may be roughly gauged from the passages quoted above. On theother hand, the language has gained by the incorporation of many Romancewords, shortly after the Norman Conquest, such as _place_, _voice_, _judge_, _war_, and _royal_. Some of these have entirely supersedednative old English words. Thus the Norman-French _uncle_, _aunt_, _cousin_, _nephew_, and _niece_, have wholly ousted their Anglo-Saxonequivalents. In other instances the Romance words have enriched thelanguage with symbols for really new ideas. This is still morestrikingly the case with the direct importations from the classicalGreek and Latin which began at the period of the Renaissance. Such wordsusually refer either to abstract conceptions for which the Englishlanguage had no suitable expression, or to the accurate terminology ofthe advanced sciences. In every-day conversation our vocabulary isalmost entirely English; in speaking or writing upon philosophical orscientific subjects it is largely intermixed with Romance andGræco-Latin elements. On the whole, though it is to be regretted thatmany strong, vigorous or poetical old Teutonic roots should have beenallowed to fall into disuse, it may safely be asserted that our gainshave far more than outbalanced our losses in this respect. 

It must never be forgotten, however, that the whole framework of ourlanguage still remains, in every case, purely English–that is to say, Anglo-Saxon or Low Dutch–however many foreign elements may happen toenter into its vocabulary. We can frame many sentences without using oneword of Romance or classical origin: we cannot frame a single sentencewithout using words of English origin. The Authorised Version of theBible, "The Pilgrim's Progress, " and such poems as Tennyson's "Dora, "consist almost entirely of Teutonic elements. Even when the vocabularyis largely classical, as in Johnson's "Rasselas" and some parts of"Paradise Lost, " the grammatical structure, the prepositions, thepronouns, the auxiliary verbs, and the connecting particles, are allnecessarily and purely English. Two examples will suffice to make thisprinciple perfectly clear. In the first, which is the most familiarquotation from Shakespeare, all the words of foreign origin have beenprinted in italics:–

 To be, or not to be, –that is the _question_: Whether 'tis _nobler_ in the mind to _suffer_ The slings and arrows of _outrageous fortune_; Or to take _arms_ against a sea of _troubles_, And, by _opposing_, end them? To die, –to sleep, – No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand _natural_ shocks That flesh is _heir_ to, –'tis a _consummation_ _Devoutly_ to be wished. To die, –to sleep;– To sleep! _perchance_ to dream: ay, there's the rub For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this _mortal_ coil, Must give us _pause_: there's the _respect_ That makes _calamity_ of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The _oppressor's_ wrong, the proud man's _contumely_, The _pangs_ of _despised_ love, the law's _delay_, The _insolence_ of _office_, and the _spurns_ That _patient merit_ of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his _quietus_ make With a bare bodkin?

Here, out of 167 words, we find only 28 of foreign origin; and eventhese are Englished in their terminations or adjuncts. _Noble_ isNorman-French; but the comparative _nobler_ stamps it with the Teutonicmark. _Oppose_ is Latin; but the participle _opposing_ is true English. _Devout_ is naturalised by the native adverbial termination, _devoutly_. _Oppressor's_ and _despised_ take English inflexions. The formativeelements, _or_, _not_, _that_, _the_, _in_, _and_, _by_, _we_, and therest, are all English. The only complete sentence which we could frameof wholly Latin words would be an imperative standing alone, as, "Observe, " and even this would be English in form. 

On the other hand, we may take the following passage from Mr. HerbertSpencer as a specimen of the largely Latinised vocabulary needed forexpressing the exact ideas of science or philosophy. Here also borrowedwords are printed in italics:–

"The _constitution_ which we _assign_ to this _etherial medium_, however, like the _constitution_ we _assign_ to _solid substance_, is_necessarily_ an _abstract_ of the _impressions received_ from_tangible_ bodies. The _opposition_ to _pressure_ which a _tangible_body _offers_ to us is not shown in one _direction_ only, but in all_directions_; and so likewise is its _tenacity_. _Suppose countlesslines radiating_ from its _centre_ on every side, and it _resists_ alongeach of these _lines_ and _coheres_ along each of these _lines_. Hencethe _constitution_ of those _ultimate units_ through the_instrumentality_ of which _phenomena_ are _interpreted_. Be they_atoms_ of _ponderable matter_ or _molecules_ of _ether_, the_properties_ we _conceive_ them to _possess_ are nothing else than these_perceptible properties idealised_. "

In this case, out of 122 words we find no less than 46 are of foreignorigin. Though this large proportion sufficiently shows the amount ofour indebtedness to the classical languages for our abstract orspecialised scientific terms, the absolutely indisputable nature of theEnglish substratum remains clearly evident. The tongue which we useto-day is enriched by valuable loan words from many separate sources;but it is still as it has always been, English and nothing else. It isthe self-same speech with the tongue of the Sleswick pirates and theWest Saxon over-lords. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

ANGLO-SAXON NOMENCLATURE. 

Perhaps nothing tends more to repel the modern English student from theearly history of his country than the very unfamiliar appearance of thepersonal names which he meets before the Norman Conquest. There can beno doubt that such a shrinking from the first stages of our nationalannals does really exist; and it seems to be largely due to this verysuperficial and somewhat unphilosophical cause. Before the Normaninvasion, the modern Englishman finds himself apparently among completeforeigners, in the Æthelwulfs, the Eadgyths, the Oswius, and theSeaxburhs of the Chronicle; while he hails the Norman invaders, theJohns, Henrys, Williams, and Roberts, of the period immediatelysucceeding the conquest, as familiar English friends. The contrast canscarcely be better given than in the story told about Æthelred's Normanwife. Her name was Ymma, or Emma; but the English of that time murmuredagainst such an outlandish sound, and so the Lady received a new Englishname as Ælfgifu. At the present day our nomenclature has changed soutterly that Emma sounds like ordinary English, while Ælfgifu soundslike a wholly foreign word. The incidental light thrown upon our historyby the careful study of personal names is indeed so valuable that a fewremarks upon the subject seem necessary in order to complete our hastysurvey of Anglo-Saxon Britain. 

During the very earliest period when we catch a glimpse of the Englishpeople on the Continent or in eastern Britain, a double system of namingseems to have prevailed, not wholly unlike our modern plan of Christianand surname. The clan name was appended to the personal one. A man wasapparently described as Wulf the Holting, or as Creoda the Æscing. Theclan names were in many cases common to the English and the ContinentalTeutons. Thus we find Helsings in the English Helsington and the SwedishHelsingland; Harlings in the English Harlingham and the FrisianHarlingen; and Bleccings in the English Bletchingley and theScandinavian Bleckingen. Our Thyrings at Thorrington answer, perhaps, tothe Thuringians; our Myrgings at Merrington to the Frankish Merwings orMerovingians; our Wærings at Warrington to the Norse Væringjar orVarangians. At any rate, the clan organization was one common to bothgreat branches of the Teutonic stock, and it has left its mark deeplyupon our modern nomenclature, both in England and in Germany. Mr. Kemblehas enumerated nearly 200 clan names found in early English charters anddocuments, besides over 600 others inferred from local names in Englandat the present day. Taking one letter of the alphabet alone, his listincludes the Glæstings, Geddings, Gumenings, Gustings, Getings, Grundlings, Gildlings, and Gillings, from documentary evidence; and theGærsings, Gestings, Geofonings, Goldings, and Garings, with manyothers, from the inferential evidence of existing towns and villages. 

The personal names of the earliest period are in many casesuntranslateable–that is to say, as with the first stratum of Greeknames, they bear no obvious meaning in the language as we know it. Others are names of animals or natural objects. Unlike the laterhistorical cognomens, they each consist, as a rule, of a single element, not of two elements in composition. Such are the names which we get inthe narrative of the colonization and in the mythical genealogies;Hengest, Horsa, Æsc, Ælle, Cymen, Cissa, Bieda, Mægla; Ceol, Penda, Offa, Blecca; Esla, Gewis, Wig, Brand, and so forth. A few of thesenames (such as Penda and Offa), are undoubtedly historical; but of therest, some seem to be etymological blunders, like Port and Wihtgar;others to be pure myths, like Wig and Brand; and others, again, to bedoubtfully true, like Cerdic, Cissa, and Bieda, eponyms, perhaps, ofCerdices-ford, Cissan-ceaster, and Biedan-heafod. 

In the truly historical age, the clan system seems to have died out, andeach person bore, as a rule, only a single personal name. These namesare almost invariably compounded of two elements, and the elements thusemployed were comparatively few in number. Thus, we get the root_æthel_, noble, as the first half in Æthelred, Æthelwulf, Æthelberht, Æthelstan, and Æthelbald. Again, the root _ead_, rich, or powerful, occurs in Eadgar, Eadred, Eadward, Eadwine, and Eadwulf. _Ælf_, an elf, forms the prime element in Ælfred, Ælfric, Ælfwine, Ælfward, andÆlfstan. These were the favourite names of the West-Saxon royal house;the Northumbrian kings seem rather to have affected the syllable _os_, divine, as in Oswald, Oswiu, Osric, Osred, and Oslaf. _Wine_, friend, isa favourite termination found in Æscwine, Eadwine, Æthelwine, Oswine, and Ælfwine, whose meanings need no further explanation. _Wulf_ appearsas the first half in Wulfstan, Wulfric, Wulfred, and Wulfhere; while itforms the second half in Æthelwulf, Eadwulf, Ealdwulf, and Cenwulf. _Beorht_, _berht_, or _briht_, bright, or glorious, appears inBeorhtric, Beorhtwulf, Brihtwald; Æthelberht, Ealdbriht, and Eadbyrht. _Burh_, a fortress, enters into many female names, as Eadburh, Æthelburh, Sexburh, and Wihtburh. As a rule, a certain number ofsyllables seem to have been regarded as proper elements for formingpersonal names, and to have been combined somewhat fancifully, withoutmuch regard to the resulting meaning. The following short list of suchelements, in addition to the roots given above, will suffice to explainmost of the names mentioned in this work. 

_Helm_: helmet. _Gar_: spear. _Gifu_: gift. _Here_: army. _Sige_: victory. _Cyne_: royal. _Leof_: dear. _Wig_: war. _Stan_: stone. _Eald_: old, venerable. _Weard_, _ward_: ward, protection. _Red_: counsel. _Eeg_: edge, sword. _Theod_: people, nation. 

By combining these elements with those already given most of the royalor noble names in use in early England were obtained. 

With the people, however, it would seem that shorter and older formswere still in vogue. The following document, the original of which isprinted in Kemble's collection, represents the pedigree of a serf, andis interesting, both as showing the sort of names in use among theservile class, and the care with which their family relationships wererecorded, in order to preserve the rights of their lord. 

 Dudda was a boor at Hatfield, and he had three daughters: one hight Deorwyn, the other Deorswith, the third Golde. And Wulflaf at Hatfield has Deorwyn to wife. Ælfstan, at Tatchingworth, has Deorswith to wife: and Ealhstan, Ælfstan's brother, has Golde to wife. There was a man hight Hwita, bee-master at Hatfield, and he had a daughter Tate, mother of Wulfsige, the bowman; and Wulfsige's sister Lulle has Hehstan to wife, at Walden. Wifus and Dunne and Seoloce are inborn at Hatfield. Duding, son of Wifus, lives at Walden; and Ceolmund, Dunne's son, also sits at Walden; and Æthelheah, Seoloce's son, also sits at Walden. And Tate, Cenwold's sister, Mæg has to wife at Welgun; and Eadhelm, Herethryth's son, has Tate's daughter to wife. Wærlaf, Wærstan's father, was a right serf at Hatfield; he kept the grey swine there. 

In the west, and especially in Cornwall, the names of the serfs weremainly Celtic, –Griffith, Modred, Riol, and so forth, –as may be seenfrom the list of manumissions preserved in a mass-book at St. Petroc's, or Padstow. Elsewhere, however, the Celtic names seem to have droppedout, for the most part, with the Celtic language. It is true, we meetwith cases of apparently Welsh forms, like Maccus, or Rum, even inpurely Teutonic districts; and some names, such as Cerdic and Ceadwalla, seem to have been borrowed by one race from the other: while such formsas Wealtheow and Waltheof are at least suggestive of British descent:but on the whole, the conquered Britons appear everywhere to havequickly adopted the names in vogue among their conquerors. Such nameswould doubtless be considered fashionable, as was the case at a laterdate with those introduced by the Danes and the Normans. Even inCornwall a good many English forms occur among the serfs: while in veryCeltic Devonshire, English names were probably universal. 

The Danish Conquest introduced a number of Scandinavian names, especially in the North, the consideration of which belongs rather to acompanion volume. They must be briefly noted here, however, to preventconfusion with the genuine English forms. Amongst such Scandinavianintroductions, the commonest are perhaps Harold, Swegen or Swend, Ulf, Gorm or Guthrum, Orm, Yric or Eric, Cnut, and Ulfcytel. During and afterthe time of the Danish dynasty, these forms, rendered fashionable byroyal usage, became very general even among the native English. ThusEarl Godwine's sons bore Scandinavian names; and at an earlier period weeven find persons, apparently Scandinavian, fighting on the English sideagainst the Danes in East Anglia. 

But the sequel to the Norman Conquest shows us most clearly how thewhole nomenclature of a nation may be entirely altered without any largechange of race. Immediately after the Conquest the native English namesbegin to disappear, and in their place we get a crop of Williams, Walters, Rogers, Henries, Ralphs, Richards, Gilberts, and Roberts. Mostof these were originally High German forms, taken into Gaul by theFranks, borrowed from them by the Normans, and then copied by theEnglish from their foreign lords. A few, however, such as Arthur, Owen, and Alan, were Breton Welsh. Side by side with these French names, theNormans introduced the Scriptural forms, John, Matthew, Thomas, Simon, Stephen, Piers or Peter, and James; for though a few cases of Scripturalnames occur in the earlier history–for example, St. John of Beverleyand Daniel, bishop of the West Saxons–these are always borne byecclesiastics, probably as names of religion. All through the middleages, and down to very recent times, the vast majority of English menand women continued to bear these baptismal names of Normanintroduction. Only two native English forms practically survived–Edwardand Edmund–owing to mere accidents of royal favour. They were the namesof two great English saints, Eadward the Confessor and Eadmund of EastAnglia; and Henry III. Bestowed them upon his two sons, Edward I. AndEdmund of Lancaster. In this manner they became adopted into the royaland fashionable circle, and so were perpetuated to our own day. All theothers died out in mediæval times, while the few old forms now current, such as Alfred, Edgar, Athelstane, and Edwin, are mere artificialrevivals of the two last centuries. If we were to judge by nomenclaturealone, we might almost fancy that the Norman Conquest had whollyextinguished the English people. 

A few steps towards the adoption of surnames were taken even before theConquest. Titles of office were usually placed after the personal name, as Ælfred King, Lilla Thegn, Wulfnoth Cild, Ælfward Bishop, ÆthelberhtEaldorman, and Harold Earl. Double names occasionally occur, the secondbeing a nickname or true surname, as Osgod Clapa, Benedict Biscop, Thurkytel Myranheafod, Godwine Bace, and Ælfric Cerm. Trade names arealso found, as Ecceard smith, or Godwig boor. Everywhere, but especiallyin the Danish North, patronymics were in common use; for example, HaroldGodwine's son, or Thored Gunnor's son. In all these cases we getsurnames in the germ; but their general and official adoption dates fromafter the Norman Conquest. 

Local nomenclature also demands a short explanation. Most of the Romantowns continued to be called by their Roman names: Londinium, Lunden, London; Eburacum, Eoforwic, Eurewic, York; Lindum Colonia, Lincolne, Lincoln. Often _ceaster_, from _castrum_, was added: Gwent, VentaBelgarum, Wintan-ceaster, Winteceaster, Winchester; Isca, Exan-ceaster, Execestre, Exeter; Corinium, Cyren-ceaster, Cirencester. Almost everyplace which is known to have had a name at the English Conquest retainedthat name afterwards, in a more or less clipped or altered form. Examples are Kent, Wight, Devon, Dorset; Manchester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Colchester, Silchester, Uttoxeter, Wroxeter, and Chester; Thames, Severn, Ouse, Don, Aire, Derwent, Swale, and Tyne. Even where the Roman name is now lost, as atPevensey, the old form was retained in Early English days; for the"Chronicle" calls it Andredes-ceaster, that is to say, Anderida. So theold name of Bath is Akemannes-ceaster, derived from the Latin _Aqua_, Cissan-ceaster, Chichester, forms an almost solitary exception. Canterbury, or Cant-wara-byrig, was correctly known as Dwrovernum orDoroberna in Latin documents of the Anglo-Saxon period. 

On the other hand, the true English towns which grew up around thestrictly English settlements, bore names of three sorts. The first werethe clan villages, the _hams_ or _tuns_, such as Bænesingatun, Bensington; Snotingaham, Nottingham; Glæstingabyrig, Glastonbury; andWæringwica, Warwick. These have already been sufficiently illustrated;and they were situated, for the most part, in the richest agriculturallowlands. The second were towns which grew up slowly for purposes oftrade by fords of rivers or at ports: such are Oxeneford, Oxford;Bedcanford, Bedford (a British town); Stretford, Stratford; andWealingaford, Wallingford. The third were the towns which grew up in thewastes and wealds, with names of varied form but more modern origin. Asa whole, it may be said that during the entire early English period thenames of cities were mostly Roman, the names of villages and countrytowns were mostly English. 

CHAPTER XX. 

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Nothing better illustrates the original peculiarities and subsequentdevelopment of the early English mind than the Anglo-Saxon literature. Avast mass of manuscripts has been preserved for us, embracing works inprose and verse of the most varied kind; and all the most important ofthese have been made accessible to modern readers in printed copies. They cast a flood of light upon the workings of the English mind in allages, from the old pagan period in Sleswick to the date of the NormanConquest, and the subsequent gradual supplanting of our nativeliterature by a new culture based upon the Romance models. 

All national literature everywhere begins with rude songs. From theearliest period at which the English and Saxon people existed asseparate tribes at all, we may be sure that they possessed battle-songs, like those common to the whole Aryan stock. But among the Teutonic racespoetry was not distinguished by either of the peculiarities–rime ormetre–which mark off modern verse from prose, so far as its externalform is concerned. Our existing English system of versification is notderived from our old native poetry at all; it is a development of theRomance system, adopted by the school of Gower and Chaucer from theFrench and Italian poets. Its metre, or syllabic arrangement, is anadaptation from the Greek quantitative prosody, handed down throughLatin and the neo-Latin dialects; its rime is a Celtic peculiarityborrowed by the Romance nationalities, and handed on through them tomodern English literature by the Romance school of the fourteenthcentury. Our original English versification, on the other hand, wasneither rimed nor rhythmic. What answered to metre was a certainirregular swing, produced by a roughly recurrent number of accents ineach couplet, without restriction as to the number of feet or syllables. What answered to rime was a regular and marked alliteration, eachcouplet having a certain key-letter, with which three principal words inthe couplet began. In addition to these two poetical devices, Anglo-Saxon verse shows traces of parallelism, similar to that whichdistinguishes Hebrew poetry. But the alliteration and parallelism do notrun quite side by side, the second half of each alliterative coupletbeing parallel with the first half of the next couplet. Accordingly, each new sentence begins somewhat clumsily in the middle of the couplet. All these peculiarities are not, however, always to be distinguished inevery separate poem. 

The following rough translation of a very early Teutonic spell for thecure of a sprained ankle, belonging to the heathen period, willillustrate the earliest form of this alliterative verse. The key-letterin each couplet is printed in capitals, and the verse is read from endto end, not as two separate columns. [1]

 Balder and Woden Went to the Woodland: There Balder's Foal Fell, wrenching its Foot. Then Sinthgunt beguiled him, and Sunna her Sister: Then Frua beguiled him, and Folla her sister, Then Woden beguiled him, as Well he knew how; Wrench of blood, Wrench of bone, and eke Wrench of limb: Bone unto Bone, Blood unto Blood, Limb unto Limb as though Limèd it were. 

 [1] The original of this heathen charm is in the Old High German dialect; but it is quoted here as a good specimen of the early form of alliterative verse. A similar charm undoubtedly existed in Anglo-Saxon, though no copy of it has come down to our days, as we possess a modernised and Christianised English version, in which the name of our Lord is substituted for that of Balder. 

In this simple spell the alliteration serves rather as an aid to memorythan as an ornamental device. The following lines, translated from theballad on Æthelstan's victory at Brunanburh, in 937, will show thedeveloped form of the same versificatory system. The parallelism andalliteration are here well marked:–

 Æthelstan king, lord of Earls, Bestower of Bracelets, and his Brother eke, Eadmund the Ætheling, honour Eternal Won in the Slaughter, with edge of the Sword By Brunnanbury. The Bucklers they clave, Hewed the Helmets, with Hammered steel, Heirs of Edward, as was their Heritage, From their Fore-Fathers, that oft the Field They should Guard their Good folk Gainst every comer, Their Home and their Hoard. The Hated foe cringed to them, The Scottish Sailors, and the Northern Shipmen; Fated they Fell. The Field lay gory With Swordsmen's blood Since the Sun rose On Morning tide a Mighty globe, To Glide o'er the Ground, God's candle bright, The endless Lord's taper, till the great Light Sank to its Setting. There Soldiers lay, Warriors Wounded, Northern Wights, Shot over Shields; and so Scotsmen eke, Wearied with War. The West Saxon onwards, The Live-Long day in Linkèd order Followed the Footsteps of the Foul Foe. 

Of course no songs of the old heathen period were committed to writingeither in Sleswick or in Britain. The minstrels who composed them taughtthem by word of mouth to their pupils, and so handed them down fromgeneration to generation, much as the Achæan rhapsodists handed down theHomeric poems. Nevertheless, two or three such old songs were afterwardswritten out in Christian Northumbria or Wessex; and though theirheathendom has been greatly toned down by the transcribers, enoughremains to give us a graphic glimpse of the fierce and gloomy oldEnglish nature which we could not otherwise obtain. One fragment, knownas the _Fight at Finnesburh_ (rescued from a book-cover into which ithad been pasted), probably dates back before the colonisation ofBritain, and closely resembles in style the above-quoted ode. Two otherearly pieces, the _Traveller's Song_ and the _Lament of Deor_, areinserted from pagan tradition in a book of later devotional poemspreserved at Exeter. But the great epic of _Beowulf_, a work composedwhen the English and the Danes were still living in close connexion withone another by the shores of the Baltic, has been handed down to usentire, thanks to the kind intervention of some Northumbrian monk, who, by Christianising the most flagrantly heathen portions, has saved theentire work from the fate which would otherwise have overtaken it. As astriking representation of early English life and thought, this greatepic deserves a fuller description. [2]

 [2] It is right to state, however, that many scholars regard _Beowulf_ as a late translation from a Danish original. 

_Beowulf_ is written in the same short alliterative metre as that of theBrunanburh ballad, and takes its name from its hero, a servant orcompanion of the mighty Hygelac, king of the Geatas (Jutes or Goths). Ata distance from his home lay the kingdom of the Scyldings, a Danishtribe, ruled over by Hrothgar. There stood Heorot, the high hall ofheroes, the greatest mead-house ever raised. But the land of the Daneswas haunted by a terrible fiend, known as Grendel, who dwelt in a darkfen in the forest belt, girt round with shadows and lit up at eve byflitting flames. Every night Grendel came forth and carried off some ofthe Danes to devour in his home. The description of the monster himselfand of the marshland where he had his lair is full of that weird andgloomy superstition which everywhere darkens and overshadows the lifeof the savage and the heathen barbarian. The terror inspired in the rudeEnglish mind by the mark and the woodland, the home of wild beasts andof hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleamsluridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark;will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves andwild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows thehorse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire andslaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night. To these realterrors and dangers of the mark are added the fancied ones ofsuperstition. There the terrible forms begotten of man's vague dread ofthe unknown–elves and nickors and fiends–have their murkydwelling-place. The atmosphere of the strange old heathen epic isoppressive in its gloominess. Nevertheless, its poetry sometimes risesto a height of great, though barbaric, sublimity. Beowulf himself, hearing of the evil wrought by Grendel, set sail from his home for theland of the Danes. Hrothgar received him kindly, and entertained him andhis Goths with ale and song in Heorot. Wealtheow, Hrothgar's queen, gold-decked, served them with mead. But when all had retired to rest onthe couches of the great hall, in the murky night, Grendel came. Heseized and slew one of Beowulf's companions. Then the warrior of theGoths followed the monster, and wounded him sorely with his hands. Grendel fled to his lair to die. But after the contest, Grendel'smother, a no less hateful creature–the "Devil's dam" of our mediævallegends–carries on the war against the slayer of her son. Beowulfdescends to her home beneath the water, grapples with her in her cave, turns against her the weapons he finds there, and is again victorious. The Goths return to their own country laden with gifts by Hrothgar. After the death of Hygelac, Beowulf succeeds to the kingship of theGeatas, whom he rules well and prosperously for many years. At length amysterious being, named the Fire Drake, a sort of dragon guarding ahidden treasure, some of which has been stolen while its guardiansleeps, comes out to slaughter his people. The old hero buckles on hisrune-covered sword again, and goes forth to battle with the monster. Heslays it, indeed, but is blasted by its fiery breath, and dies after theencounter. His companions light his pyre upon a lofty spit of landjutting out into the winter sea. Weapons and jewels and drinking bowls, taken from the Fire Drake's treasure, were thrown into the tomb for theuse of the ghost in the other world; and a mighty barrow was raised uponthe spot to be a beacon far and wide to seafaring men. So ends the greatheathen epic. It gives us the most valuable picture which we possess ofthe daily life led by our pagan forefathers. 

But though these poems are the oldest in tone, they are not the oldestin form of all that we possess. It is probable that the most primitiveAnglo-Saxon verse was identical with prose, and consisted merely ofsentences bound together by parallelism. As alliteration, at first amere _memoria technica_, became an ornamental adjunct, and grew moredeveloped, the parallelism gradually dropped out. Gnomes or shortproverbs of this character were in common use, and they closelyresembled the mediæval proverbs current in England to the present day. 

With the introduction of Christianity, English verse took a newdirection. It was chiefly occupied in devotional and sacred poetry, orrather, such poems only have come down to us, as the monks transcribedthem alone, leaving the half-heathen war-songs of the minstrels attachedto the great houses to die out unwritten. The first piece of Englishliterature which we can actually date is a fragment of the greatreligious epic of Cædmon, written about the year 670. Cædmon was a poorbrother in Hild's monastery at Whitby, and he acquired the art of poetryby a miracle. Northumbria, in the sixth and seventh centuries, took thelead in Teutonic Britain; and all the early literature is Northumbrian, as all the later literature is West Saxon. Cædmon's poem consisted in aparaphrase of the Bible history, from the Creation to the Ascension. Theidea of a translation of the Bible from Latin into English would neverhave occurred to any one at that early time. English had as yet noliterary form into which it could be thrown. But Cædmon conceived thenotion of paraphrasing the Bible story in the old alliterative Teutonicverse, which was familiar to his hearers in songs like _Beowulf_. Someof the brethren translated or interpreted for him portions of theVulgate, and he threw them into rude metre. Only a single short excerpthas come down to us in the original form. There is a later completeepic, however, also attributed to Cædmon, of the same scope and purport;and it retains so much of the old heathen spirit that it may verypossibly represent a modernised version of the real Cædmon's poem, by areviser in the ninth century. At any rate, the latter work may betreated here under the name of Cædmon, by which it is universally known. It consists of a long Scriptural paraphrase, written in the alliterativemetre, short, sharp, and decisive, but not without a wild and passionatebeauty of its own. In tone it differs wonderfully little from _Beowulf_, being most at home in the war of heaven and Satan, and in the titanicdescriptions of the devils and their deeds. The conduct of the poem issingularly like that of _Paradise Lost_. Its wild and rapid stanzas showhow little Christianity had yet moulded the barbaric nature of thenewly-converted English. The epic is essentially a war-song; the Hebrewelement is far stronger than the Christian; hell takes the place ofGrendel's mere; and, to borrow Mr. Green's admirable phrase, "the versesfall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle. "

In all these works we get the genuine native English note, the wild songof a pirate race, shaped in early minstrelsy for celebrating the deedsof gods and warriors, and scarcely half-adapted afterward to the notwholly alien tone of the oldest Hebrew Scriptures. But the Latinschools, set up by the Italian monks, introduced into England a totallynew and highly-developed literature. The pagan Anglo-Saxons had notadvanced beyond the stage of ballads; they had no history, or otherprose literature of their own, except, perhaps, a few traditionalgenealogical lists, mostly mythical, and adapted to an artificialgrouping by eights and forties. The Roman missionaries brought over theRoman works, with their developed historical and philosophical style;and the change induced in England by copying these originals was asgreat as the change would now be from the rude Polynesian myths andballads to a history of Polynesia written in English, and after Englishprototypes, by a native convert. In fact, the Latin language was almostas important to the new departure as the Latin models. While the oldEnglish literary form, restricted entirely to poetry, was unfitted forany serious narrative or any reflective work, the old English tongue, suited only to the practical needs of a rude warrior race, was unfittedfor the expression of any but the simplest and most material ideas. Itis true, the vocabulary was copious, especially in terms for naturalobjects, and it was far richer than might be expected even in wordsreferring to mental states and emotions; but in the expression ofabstract ideas, and in idioms suitable for philosophical discussion, itremained still, of course, very deficient. Hence the new seriousliterature was necessarily written entirely in the Latin language, whichalone possessed the words and modes of speech fitted for itsdevelopment; but to exclude it on that account from the consideration ofAnglo-Saxon literature, as many writers have done, would be an absurdaffectation. The Latin writings of Englishmen are an integral part ofEnglish thought, and an important factor in the evolution of Englishculture. Gradually, as English monks grew to read Latin from generationto generation, they invented corresponding compounds in their ownlanguage for the abstract words of the southern tongue; and therefore bythe beginning of the eleventh century, the West Saxon speech of Ælfredand his successors had grown into a comparatively wealthy dialect, suitable for the expression of many ideas unfamiliar to the rude piratesand farmers of Sleswick and East Anglia. Thus, in later days, a richvernacular literature grew up with many distinct branches. But, in theearlier period, the use of a civilised idiom for all purposes connectedwith the higher civilisation introduced by the missionaries wasabsolutely necessary; and so we find the codes of laws, the penitentialsof the Church, the charters, and the prose literature generally, almostall written at first in Latin alone. Gradually, as the English tonguegrew fuller, we find it creeping into use for one after another of thesepurposes; but to the last an educated Anglo-Saxon could express himselffar more accurately and philosophically in the cultivated tongue of Romethan in the rough dialect of his Teutonic countrymen. We have only tocontrast the bald and meagre style of the "English Chronicle, " writtenin the mother-tongue, with the fulness and ease of Bæda's"Ecclesiastical History, " written two centuries earlier in Latin, inorder to see how great an advantage the rough Northumbrians of the earlyChristian period obtained in the gift of an old and polished instrumentfor conveying to one another their higher thoughts. 

Of this new literature (which began with the Latin biography of Wilfrithby Æddi or Eddius, and the Latin verses of Ealdhelm) the greatrepresentative is, in fact, Bæda, whose life has already beensufficiently described in an earlier chapter. Living at Jarrow, aBenedictine monastery of the strictest type, in close connection withRome, and supplied with Roman works in abundance, Bæda had thoroughlyimbibed the spirit of the southern culture, and his books reflect for usa true picture of the English barbarian toned down and almostobliterated in all distinctive features by receptivity for Italiancivilisation. The Northumbrian kingdom had just passed its prime in hisdays; and he was able to record the early history of the English Churchand People with something like Roman breadth of view. His scientificknowledge was up to that of his contemporaries abroad; while hissomewhat childish tales of miracles and visions, though they oftenbetray traces of the old heathen spirit, were not below the averagelevel of European thought in his own day. Altogether, Bæda may be takenas a fair specimen of the Romanised Englishman, alike in his strengthand in his weakness. The samples of his historical style already givenwill suffice for illustration of his Latin works; but it must not beforgotten that he was also one of the first writers to try his hand atregular English prose in his translation of St. John's Gospel. A fewEnglish verses from his lips have also come down to us, breathing theold Teutonic spirit more deeply than might be expected from his otherworks. 

During the interval between the Northumbrian and West Saxonsupremacies–the interval embraced by the eighth century, and covered bythe greatness of Mercia under Æthelbald and Offa–we have few remains ofEnglish literature. The laws of Ine the West Saxon, and of Offa theMercian, with the Penitentials of the Church, and the Charters, form thechief documents. But England gained no little credit for learning fromthe works of two Englishmen who had taken up their abode in the oldGermanic kingdom: Boniface or Winfrith, the apostle of the heathenTeutons subjugated by the Franks, and Alcuin (Ealhwine), the famousfriend and secretary of Karl the Great. Many devotional Anglo-Saxonpoems, of various dates, are kept for us in the two books preserved atExeter, and at Vercelli in North Italy. Amongst them are some byCynewulf, perhaps the most genuinely poetical of all the early minstrelsafter Cædmon. The following lines, taken from the beginning of his poem"The Phœnix" (a transcript from Lactantius), will sufficientlyillustrate his style:–

 I have heard that hidden Afar from hence On the east of earth Is a fairest isle, Lovely and famous. The lap of that land May not be reached By many mortals, Dwellers on earth; But it is divided Through the might of the Maker From all misdoers. Fair is the field, Full happy and glad, Filled with the sweetest Scented flowers. Unique is that island, Almighty the worker Mickle of might Who moulded that land. There oft lieth open To the eyes of the blest, With happiest harmony, The gate of heaven. Winsome its woods And its fair green wolds, Roomy with reaches. No rain there nor snow, Nor breath of frost, Nor fiery blast, Nor summer's heat, Nor scattered sleet, Nor fall of hail, Nor hoary rime, Nor weltering weather, Nor wintry shower, Falleth on any; But the field resteth Ever in peace, And the princely land Bloometh with blossoms. Berg there nor mount Standeth not steep, Nor stony crag High lifteth the head, As here with us, Nor vale, nor dale, Nor deep-caverned down, Hollows or hills; Nor hangeth aloft Aught of unsmooth; But ever the plain, Basks in the beam, Joyfully blooming. Twelve fathoms taller Towereth that land (As quoth in their writs Many wise men) Than ever a berg That bright among mortals High lifteth the head Among heaven's stars. 

Two noteworthy points may be marked in this extract. Its feeling fornatural scenery is quite different from the wild sublimity of thedescriptions of nature in _Beowulf_. Cynewulf's verse is essentially theverse of an agriculturist; it looks with disfavour upon mountains andrugged scenes, while its ideal is one of peaceful tillage. The monkspeaks out in it as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly differentfrom that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other fierce war-songs. Moreover, it contains one or two rimes, preserved in this translation, whose full significance will be pointed out hereafter. 

The anarchy of Northumbria, and still more the Danish inroads, put anend to the literary movement in the North and the Midlands; but thestruggle in Wessex gave new life to the West Saxon people. Under Ælfred, Winchester became the centre of English thought. But the West Saxonliterature is almost entirely written in English, not in Latin; a factwhich marks the progressive development of vocabulary and idiom in thenative tongue. Ælfred himself did much to encourage literature, invitingover learned men from the continent, and founding schools for the WestSaxon youth in his dwarfed dominions. Most of the Winchester works areattributed to his own pen, though doubtless he was largely aided by hisadvisers, and amongst others by Asser, his Welsh secretary and Bishop ofSherborne. They comprise translations into the Anglo-Saxon of Boëthius_de Consolatione_, the Universal History of Orosius, Bæda'sEcclesiastical History, and Pope Gregory's _Regula Pastoralis_. But thefact that Ælfred still has recourse to Roman originals, marks the stageof civilisation as yet mainly imitative; while the interesting passagesintercalated by the king himself show that the beginnings of a reallynative prose literature were already taking shape in English hands. 

The chief monument of this truly Anglo-Saxon literature, begun andcompleted by English writers in the English tongue alone, is theChronicle. That invaluable document, the oldest history of any Teutonicrace in its own language, was probably first compiled at the court ofÆlfred. Its earlier part consists of mere royal genealogies of thefirst West Saxon kings, together with a few traditions of thecolonisation, and some excerpts from Bæda. But with the reign ofÆthelwulf, Ælfred's father, it becomes comparatively copious, though itsrecords still remain dry and matter-of-fact, a bare statement of facts, without comment or emotional display. The following extract, giving theaccount of Ælfred's death, will show its meagre nature. The passage hasbeen modernised as little as is consistent with its intelligibility atthe present day:–

 An. 901. Here died Ælfred Æthulfing [Æthelwulfing–the son of Æthelwulf], six nights ere All Hallow Mass. He was king over all English-kin, bar that deal that was under Danish weald [dominion]; and he held that kingdom three half-years less than thirty winters. There came Eadward his son to the rule. And there seized Æthelwold ætheling, his father's brother's son, the ham [villa] at Winburne [Wimbourne], and at Tweoxneam [Christchurch], by the king's unthank and his witan's [without leave from the king]. There rode the king with his fyrd till he reached Badbury against Winburne. And Æthelwold sat within the ham, with the men that to him had bowed, and he had forwrought [obstructed] all the gates in, and said that he would either there live or there lie. Thereupon rode the ætheling on night away, and sought the [Danish] host in Northumbria, and they took him for king and bowed to him. And the king bade ride after him, but they could not outride him. Then beset man the woman that he had erst taken without the king's leave, and against the bishop's word, for that she was ere that hallowed a nun. And on this ilk year forth-fared Æthelred (he was ealdorman on Devon) four weeks ere Ælfred king. 

During the Augustan age the Chronicle grows less full, but containsseveral fine war-songs, of the genuine old English type, full ofsavagery in sentiment, and abrupt or broken in manner, but marked by thesame wild poetry and harsh inversions as the older heathen ballads. Amongst them stand the lines on the fight of Brunanburh, whose exordiumis quoted above. Its close forms one of the finest passages in oldEnglish verse:–

 Behind them they Left, the Lych to devour, The Sallow kite and the Swart raven, Horny of beak, – and Him, the dusk-coated, The white-afted Erne, the corse to Enjoy, The Greedy war-hawk, and that Grey beast, The Wolf of the Wood. No such Woeful slaughter Aye on this Island Ever hath been, By edge of the Sword, as book Sayeth, Writers of Eld, since of Eastward hither English and Saxons Sailed over Sea, O'er the Broad Brine, – landed in Britain, Proud Workers of War, and o'ercame the Welsh, Earls Eager of fame, Obtaining this Earth. 

During the decadence, in the disastrous reign of Æthelred, the Chronicleregains its fulness, and the following passage may be taken as a goodspecimen of its later style. It shows the approach to comment andreflection, as the compilers grew more accustomed to historical writingin their own tongue:–

 An. 1009. Here on this year were the ships ready of which we ere spake, and there were so many of them as never ere (so far as books tell us) were made among English kin in no king's day. And man brought them all together to Sandwich, and there should they lie, and hold this earth against all outlanders [foreigners'] hosts. But we had not yet the luck nor the worship [valour] that the ship-fyrd should be of any good to this land, no more than it oft was afore. Then befel it at this ilk time or a little ere, that Brihtric, Eadric's brother the ealdorman's, forwrayed [accused] Wulfnoth child to the king: and he went out and drew unto him twenty ships, and there harried everywhere by the south shore, and wrought all evil. Then quoth man to the ship-fyrd that man might easily take them, if man were about it. Then took Brihtric to himself eighty ships and thought that he should work himself great fame if he should get Wulfnoth, quick or dead. But as they were thitherward, there came such a wind against them such as no man ere minded [remembered], and it all to-beat and to-brake the ships, and warped them on land: and soon came Wulfnoth and for-burned the ships. When this was couth [known] to the other ships where the king was, how the others fared, then was it as though it were all redeless, and the king fared him home, and the ealdormen, and the high witan, and forlet the ships thus lightly. And the folk that were on the ships brought them round eft to Lunden, and let all the people's toil thus lightly go for nought: and the victory that all English kin hoped for was no better. There this ship-fyrd was thus ended; then came, soon after Lammas, the huge foreign host, that we hight Thurkill's host, to Sandwich, and soon wended their way to Canterbury, and would quickly have won the burg if they had not rather yearned for peace of them. And all the East Kentings made peace with the host, and gave it three thousand pound. And the host there, soon after that, wended till it came to Wightland, and there everywhere in Suth-Sex, and on Hamtunshire, and eke on Berkshire harried and burnt, as their wont is. Then bade the king call out all the people, that men should hold against them on every half [side]: but none the less, look! they fared where they willed. Then one time had the king foregone before them with all the fyrd as they were going to their ships, and all the folk was ready to fight them. But it was let, through Eadric ealdorman, as it ever yet was. Then, after St. Martin's mass, they fared eft again into Kent, and took them a winter seat on Thames, and victualled themselves from East-Sex and from the shires that there next were, on the twain halves of Thames. And oft they fought against the burg of Lunden, but praise be to God, it yet stands sound, and they ever there fared evilly. And there after mid-winter they took their way up, out through Chiltern, and so to Oxenaford [Oxford], and for-burnt the burg, and took their way on to the twa halves of Thames to shipward. There man warned them that there was fyrd gathered at Lunden against them; then wended they over at Stane [Staines]. And thus fared they all the winter, and that Lent were in Kent and bettered [repaired] their ships. 

We possess several manuscript versions of the Chronicle, belonging todifferent abbeys, and containing in places somewhat different accounts. Thus the Peterborough copy is fullest on matters affecting thatmonastery, and even inserts several spurious grants, which, however, areof value as showing how incapable the writers were of scientificforgery, and so as guarantees of the general accuracy of the document. But in the main facts they all agree. Nor do they stop short at theNorman Conquest. Most of them continue half through the reign ofWilliam, and then cease; while one manuscript goes on uninterruptedlytill the reign of Stephen, and breaks off abruptly in the year 1154 withan unfinished sentence. With it, native prose literature dies downaltogether until the reign of Edward III. 

As a whole, however, the Conquest struck the death-blow of Anglo-Saxonliterature almost at once. During the reigns of Ælfred's descendantsWessex had produced a rich crop of native works on all subjects, butespecially religious. In this literature the greatest name was that ofÆlfric, whose Homilies are models of the classical West Saxon prose. But after the Conquest our native literature died out wholly, and a newliterature, founded on Romance models, took its place. The Anglo-Saxonstyle lingered on among the people, but it was gradually killed down bythe Romance style of the court writers. In prose, the history of Williamof Malmesbury, written in Latin, and in a wider continental spirit, marks the change. In poetry, the English school struggled on longer, butat last succumbed. A few words on the nature of this process will not bethrown away. 

The old Teutonic poetry, with its treble system of accent, alliteration, and parallelism, was wholly different from the Romance poetry, with itsdouble system of rime and metre. But, from an early date, the Englishthemselves were fond of verbal jingles, such as "Scot and lot, " "sac andsoc, " "frith and grith, " "eorl and ceorl, " or "might and right. " Even inthe alliterative poems we find many occasional rimes, such as "hlynedeand dynede, " "wide and side, " "Dryht-guman sine drencte mid wine, " orsuch as the rimes already quoted from Cynewulf. As time went on, andintercourse with other countries became greater, the tendency to rimesettled down into a fixed habit. Rimed Latin verse was already familiarto the clergy, and was imitated in their works. Much of the very ornateAnglo-Saxon prose of the latest period is full of strange verbal tricks, as shown in the following modernised extract from a sermon of Wulfstan. Here, the alliterative letters are printed in capitals, and the rimes initalics:–

 No Wonder is it that Woes befall us, for Well We Wot that now full many a year men little _care_ what thing they _dare_ in word or deed; and Sorely has this nation Sinned, whate'er man Say, with Manifold Sins and with right Manifold Misdeeds, with Slayings and with Slaughters, with _robbing_ and with _stabbing_, with Grasping _deed_ and hungry _Greed_, through Christian Treason and through heathen Treachery, through _guile_ and through _wile_, through _lawlessness_ and _awelessness_, through Murder of Friends and Murder of Foes, through broken Troth and broken Truth, through wedded unchastity and cloistered impurity. Little they _trow_ of marriage _vow_, as ere this I said: little they reck the breach of _oath_ or _troth_; swearing and for-swearing, on every _side_, far and _wide_, Fast and Feast they hold not, Peace and Pact they keep not, oft and anon. Thus in this _land_ they _stand_, Foes to Christendom, Friends to heathendom, Persecutors of Priests, Persecutors of People, all too many; spurners of godly law and Christian bond, who Loudly Laugh at the _Teaching_ of God's _Teachers_ and the _Preaching_ of God's _Preachers_, and whatso rightly to God's rites belongs. 

The nation was thus clearly preparing itself from within for theadoption of the Romance system. Immediately after the Conquest, rimesbegin to appear distinctly, while alliteration begins to die out. AnAnglo-Saxon poem on the character of William the Conqueror, inserted inthe Chronicle under the year of his death, consists of very rude rimeswhich may be modernised as follows–

 Gold he took by might, And of great unright, From his folk with evil deed For sore little need. He was on greediness befallen, And getsomeness he loved withal. He set a mickle deer frith, And he laid laws therewith, That whoso slew hart or hind Him should man then blinden. He forbade to slay the harts, And so eke the boars. So well he loved the high deer As if he their father were. Eke he set by the hares That they might freely fare. His rich men mourned it And the poor men wailed it. But he was so firmly wrought That he recked of all nought. And they must all withal The king's will follow, If they wished to live Or their land have, Or their goods eke, Or his peace to seek. Woe is me, That any man so proud should be, Thus himself up to raise, And over all men to boast. May God Almighty show his soul mild-heart-ness, And do him for his sins forgiveness!

From that time English poetry bifurcates. On the one hand, we have thesurvival of the old Teutonic alliterative swing in Layamon's Brut and inPiers Plowman–the native verse of the people sung by native minstrels:and on the other hand we have the new Romance rimed metre in Robert ofGloucester, "William of Palerne, " Gower, and Chaucer. But from PiersPlowman and Chaucer onward the Romance system conquers and the Teutonicsystem dies rapidly. Our modern poetry is wholly Romance in descent, form, and spirit. 

Thus in literature as in civilisation generally, the culture of oldRome, either as handed down ecclesiastically through the Latin, or ashanded down popularly through the Norman-French, overcame the nativeAnglo-Saxon culture, such as it was, and drove it utterly out of theEngland which we now know. Though a new literature, in Latin andEnglish, sprang up after the Conquest, that literature had its roots, not in Sleswick or in Wessex, but in Greece, in Rome, in Provence, andin Normandy. With the Normans, a new era began–an era when Romancecivilisation was grafted by harsh but strong hands on to the Anglo-Saxonstock, the Anglo-Saxon institutions, and the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Withthe first step in this revolution, our present volume has completed itsassigned task. The story of the Normans will be told by another pen inthe same series. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 

Perhaps the best way of summing up the results of the present inquirywill be by considering briefly the main elements of our existing lifeand our actual empire which we owe to the Anglo-Saxon nationality. Wemay most easily glance at them under the five separate heads of blood, character, language, civilisation, and institutions. 

In _blood_, it is probable that the importance of the Anglo-Saxonelement has been generally over-estimated. It has been too usual tospeak of England as though it were synonymous with Britain, and tooverlook the numerical strength of the Celtic population in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. It has been too usual, also, to neglectthe considerable Danish, Norwegian, and Norman element, which, thoughbelonging to the same Low German and Scandinavian stock, yet differs insome important particulars from the Anglo-Saxon. But we have seen reasonto conclude that even in the most purely Teutonic region of Britain, thedistrict between Forth and Southampton Water, a considerable proportionof the people were of Celtic or pre-Celtic descent, from the very firstage of English settlement. This conclusion is borne out both by thephysical traits of the peasantry and the nature of the early remains. Inthe western half of South Britain, from Clyde to Cornwall, theproportion of Anglo-Saxon blood has probably always been far smaller. The Norman conquerors themselves were of mixed Scandinavian, Gaulish, and Breton descent. Throughout the middle ages, the more Teutonic halfof Britain–the southern and eastern tract–was undoubtedly the mostimportant: and the English, mixed with Scandinavians from Denmark orNormandy, formed the ruling caste. Up to the days of Elizabeth, TeutonicBritain led the van in civilisation, population, and commerce. But sincethe age of the Tudors, it seems probable, as Dr. Rolleston and othershave shown, that the Celtic element has largely reasserted itself. Areturn wave of Celts has inundated the Teutonic region. ScottishHighlanders have poured into Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London: Welshmenhave poured into Liverpool, Manchester, and all the great towns ofEngland: Irishmen have poured into every part of the British dominions. During the middle ages, the Teutonic portion of Britain was by far themost densely populated; but at the present day, the almost completerestriction of coal to the Celtic or semi-Celtic area has aggregated thegreatest masses of population in the west and north. If we take intoconsideration the probable large substratum of Celts or earlier races inthe Teutonic counties, the wide area of the undoubted Celtic regionwhich pours forth a constant stream of emigrants towards the Teutonictract, the change of importance between south-east and north-west, sincethe industrial development of the coal country, and the more rapid rateof increase among the Celts, it becomes highly probable that notone-half the population of the British Isles is really of Teutonicdescent. Moreover, it must be remembered that, whatever may have beenthe case in the primitive Anglo-Saxon period, intermarriages betweenCelts and Teutons have been common for at least four centuries past; andthat therefore almost all Englishmen at the present day possess at leasta fraction of Celtic blood. 

"The people, " says Professor Huxley, "are vastly less Teutonic thantheir language. " It is not likely that any absolutely pure-bloodedAnglo-Saxons now exist in our midst at all, except perhaps among thefarmer class in the most Teutonic and agricultural shires: and even thisexception is extremely doubtful. Persons bearing the most obviouslyCeltic names–Welsh, Cornish, Irish, or Highland Scots–are to be foundin all our large towns, and scattered up and down through the countrydistricts. Hence we may conclude with great probability that theAnglo-Saxon blood has long since been everywhere diluted by a strongCeltic intermixture. Even in the earliest times and in the most Teutoniccounties, many serfs of non-Teutonic race existed from the verybeginning: their masters have ere now mixed with other non-Teutonicfamilies elsewhere, till even the restricted English people at thepresent day can hardly claim to be much more than half Anglo-Saxon. Nordo the Teutons now even retain their position as a ruling caste. MixedCelts in England itself have long since risen to many high places. Leading families of Welsh, Cornish, Scotch, and Irish blood have alsobeen admitted into the peerage of the United Kingdom, and form a largeproportion of the House of Commons, of the official world, and of thegoverning class in India, the Colonies, and the empire generally. Thesefamilies have again intermarried with the nobility and gentry ofEnglish, Danish, or Norman extraction, and thus have added their part tothe intricate intermixture of the two races. At the present day, we canonly speak of the British people as Anglo-Saxons in a conventionalsense: so far as blood goes, we need hardly hesitate to set them down asa pretty equal admixture of Teutonic and Celtic elements. 

In _character_, the Anglo-Saxons have bequeathed to us much of theGerman solidity, industry, and patience, traits which have been largelyamalgamated with the intellectual quickness and emotional nature of theCelt, and have thus produced the prevailing English temperament as weactually know it. To the Anglo-Saxon blood we may doubtless attributeour general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence; our scientificpatience and thoroughness; our political moderation and endurance; ourmarked love of individual freedom and impatience of arbitrary restraint. The Anglo-Saxon was slow to learn, but retentive of what he learnt. Onthe other hand, he was unimaginative; and this want of imagination maybe traced in the more Teutonic counties to the present day. But whenthese qualities have been counteracted by the Celtic wealth of fancy, the race has produced the great English literature, –a literature whoseform is wholly Roman, while in matter, its more solid parts doubtlessowe much to the Teuton, and its lighter portions, especially its poetryand romance, can be definitely traced in great measure to known Celticelements. While the Teutonic blood differentiates our somewhat slow andsteady character from the more logical but volatile and unstable Gaul, the Celtic blood differentiates it from the far slower, heavier, andless quick or less imaginative Teutons of Germany and Scandinavia. 

In _language_ we owe almost everything to the Anglo-Saxons. The LowGerman dialect which they brought with them from Sleswick and Hanoverstill remains in all essentials the identical speech employed byourselves at the present day. It received a few grammatical forms fromthe cognate Scandinavian dialects; it borrowed a few score or so ofwords from the Welsh; it adopted a small Latin vocabulary ofecclesiastical terms from the early missionaries; it took in aconsiderable number of Romance elements after the Norman Conquest; itenriched itself with an immense variety of learned compounds from theGreek and Latin at the Renaissance period: but all these additionsaffected almost exclusively its stock of words, and did not in the leastinterfere with its structure or its place in the scientificclassification of languages. The English which we now speak is not inany sense a Romance tongue. It is the lineal descendant of the Englishof Ælfred and of Bæda, enlarged in its vocabulary by many words whichthey did not use, impoverished by the loss of a few which they employed, yet still essentially identical in grammar and idiom with the languageof the first Teutonic settlers. Gradually losing its inflexions from thedays of Eadgar onward, it assumed its existing type before thethirteenth century, and continuously incorporated an immense number ofFrench and Latin words, which greatly increased its value as aninstrument of thought. But it is important to recollect that the Englishtongue has nothing at all to do in its origin with either Welsh orFrench. The Teutonic speech of the Anglo-Saxon settlers drove out theold Celtic speech throughout almost all England and the Scotch Lowlandsbefore the end of the eleventh century; it drove out the Cornish in theeighteenth century; and it is now driving out the Welsh, the Erse, andthe Gaelic, under our very eyes. In language at least the British empire(save of course India) is now almost entirely English, or in otherwords, Anglo-Saxon. 

In _civilisation_, on the other hand, we owe comparatively little to thedirect Teutonic influence. The native Anglo-Saxon culture was low, andeven before its transplantation to Britain it had undergone somemodification by mediate mercantile transactions with Rome and theMediterranean states. The alphabet, coins, and even a few southernwords, (such as "alms") had already filtered through to the shores ofthe Baltic. After the colonisation of Britain, the Anglo-Saxons learntsomething of the higher agriculture from their Romanised serfs, andadopted, as early as the heathen period, some small portion of the Romansystem, so far as regarded roads, fortifications, and, perhapsbuildings. The Roman towns still stood in their midst, and a fragment, at least, of the Romanised population still carried on commerce with thehalf-Roman Frankish kingdom across the Channel. The re-introduction ofChristianity was at the same time the re-introduction of Roman culturein its later form. The Latin language and the Mediterranean arts oncemore took their place in Britain. The Romanising prelates, –Wilfrith, Theodore, Dunstan, –were also the leaders of civilisation in their owntimes. The Norman Conquest brought England into yet closer connectionwith the Continent; and Roman law and Roman arts still more deeplyaffected our native culture. Norman artificers supplanted the rudeEnglish handicraftsmen in many cases, and became a dominant class intowns. The old English literature, and especially the old Englishpoetry, died utterly out with Piers Plowman; while a new literature, based upon Romance models, took its origin with Chaucer and the otherCourt poets. Celtic-Latin rhyme ousted the genuine Teutonicalliteration. With the Renaissance, the triumph of the southern culturewas complete. Greek philosophy and Greek science formed thestarting-point for our modern developments. The ecclesiastical revoltfrom papal Rome was accompanied by a literary and artistic return to themodels of pagan Rome. The Renaissance was, in fact, the throwing off ofall that was Teutonic and mediæval, the resumption of progressivethought and scientific knowledge, at the point where it had beeninterrupted by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century. The unjadedvigour of the German races, indeed, counted for much; and Europe took upthe lost thread of the dying empire with a youthful freshness verydifferent from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean culture inits last stage. Yet it is none the less true that our whole civilisationis even now the carrying out and completion of the Greek and Romanculture in new fields and with fresh intellects. We owe little here tothe Anglo-Saxon; we owe everything to the great stream of westernculture, which began in Egypt and Assyria, permeated Greece and theArchipelago, spread to Italy and the Roman empire, and, finally, nowembraces the whole European and American world. The Teutonic intellectand the Teutonic character have largely modified the spirit of theMediterranean civilisation; but the tools, the instruments, theprocesses themselves, are all legacies from a different race. Englishmendid not invent letters, money, metallurgy, glass, architecture, andscience; they received them all ready-made, from Italy and the Ægean, ormore remotely still from the Euphrates and the Nile. Nor is it necessaryto add that in religion we have no debt to the Anglo-Saxon, our existingcreed being entirely derived through Rome from the Semitic race. 

In _institutions_, once more, the Anglo-Saxon has contributed almosteverything. Our political government, our limited monarchy, ourparliament, our shires, our hundreds, our townships, are considered bythe dominant school of historians to be all Anglo-Saxon in origin. Ourjury is derived from an Anglo-Saxon custom; our nobility and officialsare representatives of Anglo-Saxon earls and reeves. The Teuton, when hesettled in Britain, brought with him the Teutonic organisation in itsentirety. He established it throughout the whole territory which heoccupied or conquered. As the West Saxon over-lordship grew to be theEnglish kingdom, and as the English kingdom gradually annexed orcoalesced with the Welsh and Cornish principalities, the Scotch andIrish kingdoms, –the Teutonic system spread over the whole of Britain. It underwent some little modification at the hands of the Normans, andmore still at those of the Angevins; but, on the whole, it is still awide yet natural development of the old Germanic constitution. 

Thus, to sum up in a single sentence, the Anglo-Saxons have contributedabout one-half the blood of Britain, or rather less; but they havecontributed the whole framework of the language, and the whole socialand political organisation; while, on the other hand, they havecontributed hardly any of the civilisation, and none of the religion. Weare now a mixed race, almost equally Celtic and Teutonic by descent; wespeak a purely Teutonic language, with a large admixture of Latin rootsin its vocabulary; we live under Teutonic institutions; we enjoy thefruits of a Græco-Roman civilisation; and we possess a ChristianChurch, handed down to us directly through Roman sources from a Hebreworiginal. To the extent so indicated, and to that extent only, we maystill be justly styled an Anglo-Saxon people. 

INDEX. 

Ælfheah of Canterbury, 168

Ælfred the West Saxon, 136; his life, 139; his death, 140; his writings, 216

Ælle of Sussex, 24, 30

Æsc the Jute, 29

Æthelbald of Mercia, 117

Æthelberht of Kent, 85

Æthelberht of Wessex, 129

Æthelflæd of Mercia, 142

Æthelfrith of Northumbria, 53, 62

Æthelred of Wessex, 130

Æthelred the Unready, 164

Æthelstan of Wessex, 144

Æthelwulf of Wessex, 124

Aidan of Lindisfarne, 95

Akerman, Mr. , on survival of Celts, 59

Anderida, 30, 41

Anglo-Saxons, 8; their religion, 16; language, 174

Architecture, 155

Aryans, 1

Augustine, St. , of Canterbury, arrives in England, 85; colloquy with Welsh bishops, 93

Bæda, 61; his life, 109; his writings, 213, and _passim_

Bamborough built, 34; princes of, 134, 144

Bayeux, Saxon settlement at, 22

Benedict Biscop, 109

Beowulf, 185, 206, and _passim_

Bercta, queen of Kentmen, 85

Bernicia settled, 34; coalesces with Deira, 35

Boulogne, Saxon settlement at, 22

Brunanburh, battle of, 145 ballad on, 204, 218

Burhred of Mercia, 131

Cadwalla, 92, 94

Cædmon the poet, 103; his epic, 209

Cerdic the Briton, 31, 67

Cerdic the West Saxon, 24, 31

Chester, battle of, 58

Chronicle, English, 63; its origin and nature, 216; quoted, _passim_

Clans, 8, 43; meanings of their names, 80; occurrence in different shires, 81

Cnut, 169

Coifi the priest, 89

Count of the Saxon Shore, 22

Cuthberht of Lindisfarne, 97

Cuthwine of Wessex, 51

Cuthwulf of Wessex, 50

Cynewulf the poet, 214

Cynewulf of Wessex, 119

Danish invasions, 123 _et seq. _

Dawkins, Prof. Boyd, 2

Deira settled, 34

Deorham, battle of, 51

Dunstan, 147

Eadgar of Wessex, 147

Eadmund of East Anglia, 130

Eadward (the Elder), 141

Eadward (the Confessor), 170

Eadwine of Northumbria, 63; converted, 88

East Anglia colonised, 36; conquered by Danes, 130

Ecgberht of Wessex, 120

Elmet, 35; conquered by English, 67

English (or Anglians), 5; their language, _see_ Anglo-Saxons

English Chronicle, _see_ Chronicle, English

Essex colonised, 36

Felix converts East Anglia, 96

Freeman, Dr. E. A. , 57, 64, 65, 69, and _passim_

Frisians, 5; as slave merchants, 75; ships, 123; employed by Ælfred, 139

Germanic race, 4

Gewissas, 37

Gildas, 28, 47; his book, 60

Gregory the Great sends mission to England, 85

Grimm's Law, 175

Guthrum the Dane, 137

Gyrwas, 49

Hæsten the pirate, 138, 141

Harold, 170

Hastings, battle of, 171

Heathendom, 16, 71

Hengest, 28

Horsa, 28

Huxley, Prof. , on English Ethnography, 5

Hyring, king of Bernicia, 33

Ida of Northumbria, 25, 32; his pedigree, 46

Iona, 93

Jutes, 5; settle in Kent, 23, 28; in the Isle of Wight, 24, 37; in Northumbria, 32

Kemble, on British in towns, 65; on Celtic personal names in England, 66

Kent, settled by Jutes, 23, 28; converted, 85

Lincolnshire colonised, 35; converted, 91

Lindisfarne, 95

Loidis, 35

London, 37, 158

Lothian, originally English, 35; unconquered by Danes, 135; granted to king of Scots, 149

Low Germans, 5; their language, 176

Marriage in heathen times, 74, 81

Meonwaras, 37

Mercia colonised, 49; its rise under Penda, 92; its supremacy, 117; conquered by Wessex, 122; by the Danes, 131

Monasteries, 102

Nennius, 32, 67

Nithard, 9

Northumbria settled, 32; converted, 88; conquered by Danes, 130

Notitia Imperii, 22

Offa of Mercia, 117; his dyke, 118

Oswald of Northumbria, 94

Oswiu of Northumbria, 95

Palgrave, Sir F. , 66

Paulinus, 88

Penda of Mercia, 91, 94

Phillips, Prof. , on Celtic blood in Yorkshire, 57

Port, mythical hero, 31

Rolleston, Prof. , on Anglo-Saxon barrows, 25; on survival of Celts, 59

Ruim, old name of Thanet, 23

Runes, 97

Salisbury conquered by English, 50

Saxons, 5; English, so called by Celtic races, 21; settle in Sussex, 24; in Essex, 36; in Wessex, 37

Saxons, Old, 7; their constitution, 9

Ships of bronze age, 19; of iron age, 20; king Ælfred's, 139

Stubbs, Rev. Canon, 120, and _passim_

Sussex settled, 24, 29

Swegen, 165

Taylor, Rev. Isaac, on Hundreds, 68

Teutonic race, 4

Thanet, 23

Theodore of Canterbury, 107

Thunor, 16; his worship, 77

Towns, 157

Totemism, 79

Vortigern, 28

Wessex settled, 24, 31

Whitby, synod of, 97; abbey at, 103

Wight, settled by Jutes, 23

Wihtgar, 31

Wilfrith of York, 97, 105, 108

Winchester, 37, 158

Winwidfield, 96

Woden, 16, 46; his worship, 76

THE END. 

 * * * * *

WYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, GREAT QUEEN STREET, LONDON, W. C.