A.D. 294-418.] ROMAN REMAINS. 31 But London, it may be supposed, was the principal seat and station in the South, and the Romans confined their grandeur and ostentation to the seat of government. Wherever they settled the tale is still the same; still, stately buildings and luxurious homes. At Uriconium, or Wroxeter, on the Severn, the world is every day astonished at the results of exploration under the soil. Streets have been uncovered, ornamented, like those of London, with spacious temples, and guarded by ponderous walls. The ruins of the Roman city have in some places overtopped the sod, and projected their summits into the daylight of fourteen centuries without ever having attracted notice, or being of more use than perhaps to give name to a field. But these, and other evidences of the same kind, prove that the Roman style of military occupation was different from ours. As the missionaries of the Christian faith carry the sacred truths of our religion among the ignorant and benighted, the Romans, the missionaries of social life, carried their domestic ideas and private habits into whatever quarter they visited. More efficacious in reclaiming from barbarism than any eloquence or authority, was the sight of the daily existence of the race which had conquered the world. The forebodings of the civilized natives were founded on the reverence they themselves had entertained for the outward symbols of settlement and peace. The comfortable house, the cultivated garden, the ornamented street, the richly decorated temple,these they had looked on as the external manifestations of the imperial power, and of the security and freedom they enjoyed. When the assailant comes, they thought, he will wreak his first vengeance on the monuments of that happier existence which he does not understand, and what distinction will be left between the howling barbarian who never knew the elevating enjoyments of a safe and happy home, and the dispossessed proprietor whose peaceful cottage, as it was in ancient days, an emblem of advanced intelligence and recognised law, is now a charred and crumbling ruin, the type of a return to the same savage degradation from which the Romans drew our ancestors so many hundred years before. The humiliating truth implied in those helpless anticipations must be confessed with respect to all the other populations which had become subject to Rome. She first civilized them with her arts and elevated them with her principles of law, and then enervated them with her protection, and, as her own ancient spirit decayed, corrupted them with her vices. A government can do too much as well as too little. The central power was everywhere; and, except in the petty struggles of the municipal towns, individual action was unknown. The frightful wickedness of the capital was extolled and imitated here. Men who could not fight and would not govern, crowded to the amphitheatre and saw the combats of beasts and gladiators. As we feel no compassion for the overthrow of the wild liberties of our barbaric predecessors by the Claudian invasion, we shall do well to curb our indignation. at the destruction of a refinement which incapacitated a people from serious endeavours, and of a system of government which reduced it to the dependent condition of children or slaves. A.D. LANDMARKS OF CHRONOLOGY. A.D. and constructs a great northern rampart from the Solway to the Tyne, known as the Picts' Wall. 210. Severus, the Emperor, visits Bri- 211. Death of Severus. 293. Carausius assassinated by Alectus. Wight, and is cordially received. 306. Death of Constantius at York. Constantine the Great, who was born at York, assumes the imperial purple. 337. Death of Constantine. BOOK III. THE SAXON OCCUPATION. THE HEPTARCHY. A.D. 418 TO THE UNION OF STATES UNDER EGBert, a.d. 830, AND HIS DEATH, 837. § 1. Disturbed state of the world after the departure of the Romans.§ 2. Britain, exposed to the irruptions of the Northern barbarians, solicits the Romans for assistance, but in vain.-§ 3. Vortigern, Prince of the Danmonii, applies to the Saxons for aid. The Saxons effect a landing in the Isle of Thanet.-§ 4. Their conquests. -§ 5. Kingdom of the East Angles established.-§ 6. Wessex, and the kingdom of Northumbria. The seven States of the Heptarchy. 7. Extensive territories occupied by the Saxon lords.§ 8. Advantages of property and order appreciated. Augustine, the monk, recognised as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England. § 9. Vast improvements in the thoughts and feelings of the people. Annals of the Heptarchy confused. The Kingdom of Wessex.-§ 10. Consequences of the death of Egbert, the first monarch of England. § 1. THE annals of our island for a period of thirty years after the temporary retirement of the Romans in 418, are so involved and contradictory, that great scope is left for the ingenuity of historians to unravel and reconcile them. It was a period of disturbance and unrest in all quarters of the world. As soon as Rome was found to be weak, the savage peoples who had been collecting for ages on the limits of her power, and had been repelled by the strength of her legions and the awe they still entertained for her name, broke through the boundaries, and poured themselves all over the civilized lands which had resisted their attempts so long. Tribe after tribe of strange and uncouth name followed each other with the regularity and force of waves of the sea. Burgundians, D Visigoths, and Sweves established themselves in Switzerland and Spain. The rich shores of Africa were seized by the Vandals; and the hardy sons of the north, the Saxons, the Jutes, and Angles prepared to follow the example of the other barbarians, and transport themselves into more fertile lands. There never was a prey more tempting or more easy than the disarmed and Romanized Britain. Its southern portion lay open to the hand of the first invader who chose to seize it. The inhabitants were wealthy and spiritlessthe youth of the country and all its foreign garrisons had been carried over to resist the hordes which were devastating the Italian fields; little confidence could be placed in the turf bank which guarded them from the Picts and Scots, and still less in the undefended walls which surrounded their luxurious towns. Wherever there had in old times been a "castra," or permanent camp, there was now a city filled with all the appliances of a civilization which was in fact too high for the people on whom it had been impressed. A complicated machinery of taxation and government was almost unintelligible to a population whose ambition was curtailed within such narrow bounds. They had no arms, no discipline, no patriotic feelings; they could only "eat, and sleep, and hoard," and left all the rest to the superior power. § 2. Eight-and-twenty municipal towns and innumerable smaller stations, churches, and other public buildings, with villas and country-houses belonging to the great officers of the occupation, scattered as they were all over the country, acted as baits to the cupidity of the still unreclaimed barbarians of the north. These savage hordes, bursting over the feeble ramparts of Hadrian and Severus, pressed onwards towards the central lowlands, and are reported to have made a dash upon London itself. But necessity and fear at last produced some appearance of combination and courage on the part of the civilized Britons. The towns entered into confederacies for mutual support. Arms were put into the hands A.D. 418–447.] WITHDRAWAL OF THE ROMANS. 35 of the population, and leaders arose who established their authority on independent terms. Their independence, however, took the unhappy form of mutual war. Instead of combining against the common foe, they weakened the country by factions and quarrels. In these civil distractions. the contending parties bargained for assistance from every quarter. There were settlements of northern peoples all along the eastern coast, thinly populated, and probably not unconnected either with the Roman or British authorities. Some small districts had been assigned to foreign tribes by the Emperors of later date, and the families of the native wives of the soldiers remained in the land of their birth after the withdrawal of their fathers. Those fathers, though serving in the Roman ranks, were certainly not Roman, and very likely not even Italians. They might be Illyrians, Goths, Scythians, swarthy men from the Numidian plains, or the light-haired dwellers of the Rhætian Alps. Enlisted on different sides in these local dissensions, the diversified populations had no central authority round which to gather. Town after town was therefore given to the flames by the advancing Picts and Scots on the north, and the returning thousands of ancient Britons from the borders of Wales. Twice the application made for assistance by the distressed inhabitants was successful with the Roman chiefs. On each occasion a single legion was sufficient to expel the invaders, and reinstate the citizens in their former security; but when the heart of the empire became weak, and enemies were gathered round the walls of the Eternal City itself, no further aid could be given. The "groans of the Britons," as their last touching appeals were called, were disregarded, and the legion which had been their sole protection was finally withdrawn in 447, having given the last proof of its care for the land which it had so long protected by repairing the rampart between the Tyne and Solway. It is a mere rhetorical exaggeration of the now degraded |