families, and the women were accustomed to accompany the army, so that every man felt that the eyes of his whole kindred were upon him. Both in war and peace 'those who had signalised themselves by a spirit of enterprise had always a number of retainers in their train.' A spirit of emulation prevailed among the whole band, all struggling to be first in their lord's favour. In battle it was disgraceful for the chief to fall behind his followers, or for the followers to fall behind their chief food was the only pay provided by the leader, and this he was expected to give in abundance. In Germany the utmost sanctity was given to the institution of marriage, polygamy was the exception, and vice of all kinds was severely punished. Unlike the Romans, the Germans detested town life, and Ammianus Marcellinus says 'that they beheld the Roman cities with contempt, and called them sepulchres encompassed with nets.' Their habit was to live apart, and even in their villages the houses were always detached one from another. Their chief wealth consisted of cattle; and, though corn was grown, they despised agriculture. "To cultivate the earth and wait the regular produce of the seasons was not the maxim of a German; you more easily persuaded him to attack the enemy and provoke honourable wounds in the day of battle.' In a word, to earn by the sweat of your brow what you might gain by the price of your blood was, in the opinion of a German, a sluggish principle unworthy of a soldier. It is clear from the account of Tacitus that the German warriors were incorrigibly idle: they left the work of the field to their slaves, and that of the house to their wives and daughters, while they themselves, when not engaged in council or war, occupied themselves with hunting, sleeping, drinking, or dice. In short, they had both the virtues and the vices of a free and high-spirited but uncivilised race.

Of the Saxons, in particular, Tacitus says nothing, and only mentions the Angles to say that they have no special characteristics. It may therefore be taken for granted that these tribes are fairly The Saxons. delineated by his description of the Germans in general.

It is remarkable that Tacitus had only heard of one tribe of seafaring Germans, the Suiones, and that he should place the Angles far from the coast; but after his day the shifting of the tribes must have brought the Angles down to the shore, when the seductions of piracy must have incited the landsmen to follow their old trade of robbery upon a new element. At any rate, long before the Romans left Britain they were well acquainted with the audacity of the Saxon seamen, who, as was said of the Suiones, 'inhabited the ocean,' and chose the stormiest weather to put to sea as most favourable to their nefarious designs. Some years ago one of their war canoes was dug up in a bog in Sleswick, and was

found to be sixty-one feet long, nine feet broad, propelled by twenty-four oars, and capable of carrying one hundred and twenty men.

Evidence

as to the Saxon

Gildas.

Nennius. Bede. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The documentary evidence which relates to the early years of the English conquest is to be found in four books, namely: Gildas On the Destruction of Britain; the Ecclesiastical History of Bede; the History of the Britons, which goes under the name of Conquest. Nennius; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Gildas was born in the year 516 and wrote about 560; Bede was born in 672 and died in 735; the History of the Britons was composed in the latter half of the ninth century; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle a little later. The only contemporary writer, therefore, is Gildas, and even he was not born till the Romans had left Britain more than a century. His book, too, is much more of a sermon on the wickedness of the Britons than a narrative, and is very rhetorical and involved; but, on the other hand, Gildas's statements being merely bases for his reflections, and being made to persons who knew at any rate the traditional truth, are not liable to the charge of invention.

Gildas's
Account.

Taking Gildas, then, as our guide, we find that the most serious foes of the Britons were the Picts and the Scots, and that no trouble was at first experienced from the Saxons. This is perfectly natural, because so long as the forts of the Saxon shore were repaired and garrisoned it would be perfectly useless for the Saxons, wholly unaccustomed, as they must have been, to the art of besieging such places, to try and pass them. At the end of thirty years, however, there were two rival authorities, whose names, Gurthrigernus and Aurelius, suggest a Celtic and Roman division; and one of these, Gurthrigernus or Vortigern, called in the Saxons, and the usual quarrel between mercenaries and their employers followed. The Saxons, having thus by the folly of the Britons been permitted to pass the fortresses of the Saxon shore, were able to land at pleasure, and soon made their raids so formidable that the whole of the inhabitants of the lowlands were slaughtered, fled over sea, surrendered as slaves, or led a miserable life in the hills and woods. After a time the Saxons came into conflict with Aurelius and his followers, and suffered a crushing defeat, and after a long alternation of success and failure were completely routed at Mount Badon in 516, after which their attacks upon the Celts ceased for a time. Nevertheless, so ruinous had been the long struggle, that the Celts could no longer occupy their former possessions, so that the land lay desolate. This last statement of Gildas supplies the key to much that has hitherto appeared obscure; for if the settlements of the English were made not in lands from which the Britons had just been driven, but in districts which had for some time lain waste, then the disappearance of the British race, with its language,

customs, and religion, and its complete replacement by the English race, becomes perfectly intelligible and in strict accord with the only contemporary narrative that has come down to us.

As regards, therefore, the conquest of the east coast, no details can be given, and little can be added to the words of Bede enumerating the tribes which, in his day, inhabited what had once been the most Bede's flourishing part of the old Roman province. Those who Statements. came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany-the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent and of the Isle of Wight, and those of the province of the West-Saxons, who are to-day called Jutes, seated opposite the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, from the country now called old Saxony, came the East-Saxons, the South-Saxons, and the West-Saxons. From the Angles, that is, from the country now called Anglia, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, which is said to remain desert from that time to this day, are descended the East-Angles, the MidlandAngles, Mercians, and all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber and all the nations of the English.'

Of the internal condition of the British community at this period very little is known; but from Welsh chronicles it is inferred that they acknowledged the rule of one prince, the most notable of Condition of whom was Cunedda. He seems to have ruled from the the British. mouth of the Clyde to the Severn. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is less cautious than the Northern historian, but its assertions cannot be reconciled with the facts of which Gildas is a contemporary Nennius witness; while Nennius makes the Britons victorious in and Angloevery battle of a war in which they were undoubtedly Chronicle driven from their country. In all probability, therefore, the manner of the coming of the West-Saxons was soon forgotten by their descendants, and was afterwards supplied by conjecture.

Saxon

irreconcil

able with

facts.

However, about the time when Gildas was writing, there came to the throne of the West-Saxons a king whose long reign from 560 to 590 brings us almost to the date of the arrival of Christian missionaries, Beginning and, with them, of competent and educated historians. of Authentic History. This king was Ceawlin, and from his reign the authentic history of the English conquest of Britain may be said to begin. Ceawlin's first exploit was a war against Ethelbert of Kent; and after confining him to his own territory, Ceawlin turned his arms against the Britons, and so terminated the long peace which, according to Gildas, an eye-witness, followed the battle of Mount Badon.

Ceawlin.

First he drove them out of the valley of the upper Thames, and then, in 577, he crossed the Fosseway and stormed the great camp at Dyrham, where for the first time the English invaders looked down on Battle of Dyrham. the fair plain of Severn and the distant mountains of Wales. The cities of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester were the spoil of the victors, and they were sacked so effectively by the rude Barbarians that they lay desolate for centuries; so undisturbed by the presence of man that a wild duck ventured to make her nest and lay her eggs in one of the most beautiful of the luxurious Roman baths. Seven years later, Ceawlin followed up his victory by a second invasion of the valley of the Severn; and though he was turned back on the borders of Faddiley. modern Cheshire by a defeat at Faddiley, the fine city of Uriconium was burnt to the ground, Roman civilisation was completely effaced, and the Saxons returned to their own land laden with spoil. From that day the lower Severn valley began to be occupied by a Teutonic population, whose speech attested their West-Saxon origin.

Battle of

Battle of

Meanwhile, the Anglian settlements of Bernicia and Deira, which occupied the coast from the Forth to the Tees, and from the Tees to the Ethelfrith. Humber, had been united under the great Ethelfrith; and in 603 he won a decisive victory over the Scots dwelling in Dawstone. Britain, at Dawstone, near Carlisle. Four years later he Battle of was again in the field, and won a still more decisive battle at Chester. Chester. After the fight the Roman city of Chester was sacked, and for three centuries its site lay desolate and forlorn. A great change in the condition of Celtic Britain followed the battle of Chester. The low-lying lands between the Dee and the Ribble soon ment of the fell into the hands of the Northumbrians, and likewise the English. outlying settlements of the Celts, who seem, till then, to have held their own in the highlands of the Peak and in the woods and moors of Loidis and Elmete. Henceforward, three Welsh districts only are recognised as independent: Cornwall, or West Wales; Wales proper, or North Wales; and Strathclyde. Of these, Cornwall included all those parts of the modern Somerset and Devon which had not yet fallen under the rule of the West-Saxon kings, but was cut off by an ever-increasing tract of English territory from its Welsh neighbours. North Wales,

Establish

strong in its mountain fastnesses, was able for years to resist any further advance of the Saxons; and Strathclyde, the name given to the rugged tract between Morecambe Bay and the Clyde, offered little inducement to repay the danger of invasion.

Edwin, the successor of Ethel frith, appears to have had command of a fleet, with which he conquered the islands of Man and of Mona, henceforth called Anglesea, the island of the Angles. The chief antagonist of

611

New Distribution of Population

Edwin was a British prince named Cadwallon.

25

Him Bede speaks of as rex Brittonum or Bretonum dux; and for a time Edwin seems, on the authority of the Welsh chroniclers, to have driven him into exile and ruled over his state. According to Bede, Edwin

Edwin.

was the first of the English chiefs to rule over both English and Britons and adopt something of Roman state. 'His dignity was so great throughout his dominions that his banners were not only borne before him in battle but even in time of peace; when he rode about his cities and towns or provinces with his officers, the standard-bearer was wont to go before him. Also when he walked along the streets that sort of banner which the Romans called Tufa and the English Tuuf was in like manner borne before him.'

Celts.

The regular advance of the English, culminating in the crushing defeat of the Britons at Dyrham, Dawstone, and Chester, made a great alteration in the geographical distribution of the Celts. Fusion of During the fifth and sixth centuries, however, two great The Kymri. changes had taken place; first, the English invasions had the effect of fusing together the Goidelic and Brythonic elements of Celtic Britain, and henceforward the distinction was lost in the name of Kymri or allies, which was adopted as the common name of the race, while the Brythonic dialect seems to have replaced the Goidelic in Southern Britain; second, the Goidels of Ireland, in the fifth century, began a series of incursions on the Ivernian territory of the Settlement Western Highlands, and established themselves in Argyle, in Scotland. from whence they spread gradually north and east, absorbing or exterminating the ancient inhabitants, till the new settlements were bounded by the ancient Brythonic and Goidelic districts. The newcomers were known as Scots, and the name Scotland for years applied only to the territory occupied by them. With regard, however, to all questions of the distribution of population, either in the English or Celtic parts of the island, it is necessary to speak with extreme caution. Even in the purest districts, the population can have been by no means unmixed; and modern researches tend to strengthen the belief in the survival of the ancient races wherever fen, forest, or hill gave an advantage to the defenders, or where the barrenness of the soil placed a natural bound to the cupidity of the new-comers.