A.D. 493-521.7

NATIVE CONDITION.

41

§ 7. Battles were fought during all these alternations of aggression and defence, of which the monuments remain to us in the heaps of bones which are turned up by the plough and the spade. Names also have continued, the landmarks of a dark and stormy period, on some of which the genius of the greatest of our poets has poured fresh light, and given a renewed existence to the shadowy impersonations of Romance. We love to recal the heroic Arthur-more heroic in his gentleness than in the exercise of his military and knightly skill -and almost persuade ourselves that his victory at Baden Hill over the West Saxon, Cerdic, the combats at Glem, and Duglas, and Bassa were distinguished by the valour and courtesy which never deserted "the Blameless King." We use fresh efforts to trace the course of this noblest of knights and gentlemen, from his palace at Caerleon to his grave at Glastonbury beside the magic mere, but are forced backward from the enchanted ring, in which all noble things are true, into the world of cold and real existences, where Arthur and his Table Round disappear before the light of common day. The contest between the combined invaders and the remote defenders of the west was sure to terminate in the triumph of the more vigorous race. Many of the defeated tribes crossed over the Severn sea from Cornwall and Devon, and found refuge in the fastnesses of the opposite shore; adding new bitterness to the feelings of their countrymen, who had long ago found a shelter from the Roman conquest in the same inaccessible defiles.

From the Straits of Dover to the mouth of the Forth, the whole land was occupied by its Saxon lords in less than a hundred and fifty years after the withdrawal of the Romans. It is impossible to over-estimate the sufferings of that extended period. In a very short time the superficial civilization introduced by the legions was effaced by the pirates from the north. The only opposition made to the ferocity of their new oppressors was by the indomitable bar

barism of the original Celts, which had offered an equal resistance to the arts and laws of the Romans. Pursued by the fresh hordes of heathen invaders as enemies, and equally hated by the ancient Britons as traitors, the Romanized natives had no chance of transmitting their refinement or experience to their posterity after the first generation. In thirty years, the few terrified inhabitants of the magnificent cities. which studded the land must have looked with helpless despair on the infuriated savages who brought in their ferocious habits and terrible gods. The next generation must have betaken themselves to the woods and wildernesses, or hidden amid the half-buried ruins of the temples and public halls which marked the sites of the dilapidated towns. Christianity fled before those sea rovers as fearfully as civilization and wealth; and before sixty years were expired we may picture to ourselves a wasted realm and ruined population, the arts of life trampled under the feet of a pitiless immigration, and bands of ravagers ransacking all the land for whatever spoil the excesses of their predecessors had left them.

§ 8. Gradually a feeling of the advantages of property and order must have dawned upon their minds; and a great step was gained when the place of leader, which the necessity of warfare had created, by the nomination of the expeditionary tribe, was converted into that of hereditary chief or king, who should regulate their affairs in peace as well as in battle. It is the first great step to political improvement when a barbaric host give their adhesion to an office and not a man. The wise and elevating thought takes possession of their minds that obedience is no longer a proof of inferiority; for the object of their submission, the king, is himself subordinated to the law, and represents the power of the nation of which the subject forms a part. The hereditary principlemodified, however, by the fact that elections might still appoint any member of the blood royal, to the exclusion of

e lineal heirs-was accordingly the first element of the

A.D. 560-602.]

BRITISH INDEPENDENCE.

43

combined kingly and popular authority. By the year 560, when Ethelbert succeeded to the kingship in Kent, all enmity between the races which occupied the south of England had ceased, either by the extirpation or submission of the British families. It is impossible to think that all the inhabitants of so large a district can have been slain, or driven away; it is much more likely that the new possessors became softened towards them in course of time, and heard from them the stories of the ancient Roman sway, and of the doctrines of the Christian faith; so that when Augustine the monk came over from Rome in 597, his efforts only spread into new quarters a flame which had never entirely died out, and converted the descendants of Woden and successors of Hengist to a belief which had long furnished consolation to the oppressed peasantry of native blood. It is only on this supposition that the rapid reception of Christianity can be reasonably accounted for among the masses of the people. The bloody feasts of the Walhalla, which fired the imaginations of the first invaders, and formed the subject of song and prophecy in the wild regions bordering on the Elbe and Eyder, lost their attraction amid the rich fields and in the milder air of Kent. Ethelbert married a Christian lady called Bertha, the daughter of Caribert, of Paris, in 575, received the emissary from Rome with kindness and respect; and in 602 we find Augustine recognised in language which might suit the prelate of the present day, as "Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England."

But the pride of the ancient Britons would no more submit to the spiritual supremacy of this intruder from Rome than it had submitted to the domination of the Saxon invaders. The bishops of Wales declined the jurisdiction of the Pontiff's nominee, and preserved the independence of their sees and their equality with the chair of St. Peter itself. The state assumed by the Roman legate offended the ecclesiastics of the west by the double claim it ostentatiously made of supremacy for a

priest in Italy, and for a cathedral seat in the dominions of the hated Saxons. National animosity infused itself into their religious differences, and Augustine, whose haughty bearing had run counter to their ideas of Christian meekness, now justified their dislike by the bitterness of his upbraidings. These took the form of prophecy, and in a year worked their own fulfilment. "If the Britons," he said, “refuse their assistance in the conversion of the Saxons, behold! the Saxon sword will be let loose upon the land." The Saxon sword obeyed the zealous missionary, and directed its vengeance principally against the rebellious priesthood, of whom two hundred were pitilessly slain near Bangor, as they prayed for the success of their countrymen.

But Edwin of Northumbria having, in 625, extended his authority over all the other kingdoms except Kent, married a daughter of Ethelbert and Bertha, and speedily submitted the nations who owned his sway to the authority of the Roman Church. The bishopric of York, which had been founded during the Roman rule, was re-established in favour of Paulinus, the favourite priest of the new queen, and step by step the blind and debasing superstitions of Scandinavia retired before the advancing gospel, as Druidism had expired before the march of material improvement. Idolatry was overthrown without the dangerous aid of persecution. The more reflective minds were attracted by the beauties and elevating promises of the new dispensation; the grosser intellects were disgusted with the powerlessness of their gods. when brought into contrast with a religion of holiness and purity; and some-like the ambitious priest Coifi, who discovered the dulness of his divinities in the fact that they had neglected to promote a man of his extraordinary merit to the richest offices in the order-were discontented with the inadequacy of the hopes held out by the Edda, and turned with trust and happiness to the new revelations of a future life.

§ 9. Amid all the childish exaggerations and simple cre

A.D. 625-837.] IMPROVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE.

45

dulity of the venerable Bede, and the other chroniclers of those early days, we can see a vast improvement in the thoughts and feelings of the people. Gentleness to the weak, generosity to the poor, humility in themselves, are inculcated on the newly-converted heathens in every page; and if we are inclined to laugh at the futile wonders and impossible incidents recorded at the same time, we must accept them as the measure of the critical faculty of the period, and turn with truer admiration to the precepts of charity and forbearance when we find them asserting their divine origin unobscured by the ignorance which lies so thick and palpable on every other subject.

The annals of the Heptarchy are confused by a want of method, and by the unavoidable uncertainty of events where there were no witnesses to record them till long intervals had elapsed, and the story had passed through several hands. An aged monk, sitting in his solitary study in a monastery on the distant Wear, was dependent for his narrative of incidents in Essex or Kent on the hearsay evidence of some other monk, who travelled on the business of the church, and found shelter in the walls of Jarrow. For the proceedings of kings and warriors in Northumberland itself he had to trust to the still less reliable reports of soldiers who had escaped from some battle, and were fed at the refectory door; or some despoiled and revengeful priest who had been ruined. by the invasion of the Welsh. There were no conflicting accounts from different and independent sources to be sifted and weighed against each other, as in our newspaper announcements of the present day, and many, in despair at the difficulty of unravelling the tangled skein of the chronicles of the boisterous and unsettled Saxon confederacies which called themselves kingdoms, have passed them over altogether as no more deserving of notice than the quarrels and reconciliations of kites or crows. But though individual traits may be undiscoverable, the broad impress of that struggling and active