might have been homes for the one and the woods and broad pastures have furnished the others with their favorite prospects. But the cities went to ruin; Christianity became extinct, and all culture with it. There were still Roman roads leading to the walls and towers of empty cities; the Roman divisions of the land were conspicuous: the intrenched and fortified camps, the great villas of the princely families, churches, and burial-places, but they were become, before the days of Bede, mere haunted ruins, something like the mysterious fabrics which in Central America tell of the rule of a mighty race whose name is forgotten.

§3. British and Roman Survivals

It is not to be supposed that this desolation was uniform; in some of the cities there were probably elements of continuous life. London the mart of the merchants, York the capital of the North, and some others have a continuous political existence, al- / though they wisely do not venture, like some of the towns of Southern France, to claim an unbroken succession from Roman municipalities. The new race found the convenience of ready-built houses and accumulated stores of material; and wherever the cities were spared, a portion at least of the city population must have continued also. In the country, too, especially toward the West and the debatable border, great numbers of Britons may have survived in servile or half-servile condition; some few of the greater men may have made, and probably did make, terms for themselves, especially in the districts appropriated by the smaller detachments of adventurers; and the public lands of the new kingdoms must have required native cultivators. But all these probabilities only bring out more strongly the improbability of any general commixture or amalgamation of the races. turies after the conquest the Briton by extraction was distinguished by his wergild from the man of the ruling race. It is impossible that such a commixture could have taken place with out leaving its traces on the languages or the religion. The English of Alfred's time is, except where the common terms of ecclesiastical language come in, purely Germanic; British Christianity stood out against Saxon for a century after the death of Augustine; and the vestiges of Romano-British law which have filtered through local custom into the common law of England, as distinct from those which were imported in the Middle Ages through the scientific study of law or the insensible infection of cosmopolitan civilization, are infinitesimal. . . .

Cen

84. Two Important Results of the Conquest.

If it were possible to form a clear idea of the amount of civilization which the invaders already possessed, or of the organization which they were to substitute for that which thus vanished before them, we should be better able to determine the effect which was produced on them by the process of conquest. But as it is, only two great generalizations seem possible. In the first , place, conquest under the circumstances compelled colonization and migration. The wives and families were necessary to the comfort and continued existence of the settlements. It was not only that the attitude of the Britons forbade intermarriages; the Saxons, as all testimony has shown, declined the connubium of foreign races; they could not give to the strange woman the sacred prerogative of the German woman, let her cast their lots or rear their children. The tie of the cognatio and the gens was as strong as it had been of old; the new settlements were called by Gentile names, and these names involved the retention of the rights and duties of the maegth, the kindred. The invaders came in families and kindred, and in the full organization of their tribes; the three ranks of men, the noble, the freeman, and the laet. . . .

The process of migration and conquest must have produced royalty, and the important political appurtenances of royalty. The Saxons had no kings at home, but they created kingdoms in Britain. The testimony of tradition helps to confirm what is a sufficiently safe inference. According to the Chronicle the Brito-Welsh in A.D. 443 invited to Britain the Ethelings of the Angles; in A.D. 449 under two heretogas, Hengist and Horsa, the strangers came; in A.D. 455 Hengist and Aesc his son came to the kingdom. In A.D. 495 came two ealdormen to Britain, Cerdic and Cynric "; in A.D. 519 they became kings of the West Saxons. In Northumbria and East Anglia, when the "proceres" had in long rivalry occupied provinces and fought battles, they set up out of the most noble a king over them. In each case the erection of the throne was probably the result of some great victory, or of the permanent securing of a definite territory; but the institution was not a transference of British royalty; the new kings are kings of the nations which they had led to conquest, not of those they had conquered. In each case the son is named with his father as sharing in the first assumption of the title, a recognition of the hereditary character which is almost the only mark distinguishing the German kingship from the elective chieftainship. The royal

houses thus founded assume a divine pedigree; all trace their origin to Woden; and when they become extinct the independence of their nation comes to an end.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor. Seebohm, The English Village Community. Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land, especially the introductory essay by Professor Ashley. Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History, chap. x. Coote, The Romans in Britain, supporting the theory of the Roman survival. Guest, Early English Settlements. Freeman, Four Oxford Lectures (1888), defending the Teutonic theory. Hodgkin, Political History of England to 1066, chap. vi. Haverfield, Early British Christianity, in the English Historical Review, 1896, pp. 429 ff. Brief summary of the conflicting views in Medley, Constitutional History of England, introductory chapter.

CHAPTER III

ADOPTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND UNIFICATION OF ENGLAND

WHATEVER may have been the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conquest and settlement, the immediate political result was the foundation of several petty tribal states among which there ensued three centuries of warfare for supremacy. Dull as the annals of these three hundred years are, the period was nevertheless one of great importance in the building of the English nation. The heathen conquerors were converted to Christianity, Britain was brought into close relations with Rome, a wellplanned ecclesiastical system was founded, monks began there the work of civilization, the arts of peace flourished in spite of the conflicts, and learning increased. Doubtless the most vivid and interesting account of this period is to be found in John Richard Green's Short History of the English People.

§ 1. Rise of Kent and Landing of Augustine1

The conquest of the bulk of Britain was now complete (ca. 588). Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire, through Derbyshire and skirting the Forest of Arden to the mouth of the Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands. From this time the character of the English conquest of Britain was wholly changed. The older wars of extermination came to an end, and as the invasion pushed westward in later times the Britons were no longer wholly driven from the soil, but mingled with their conquerors. A far more important change was that which was seen in the attitude of the English conquerors from this time toward each other. Freed to a great extent from the common pressure of the war against the Britons, their energies

1Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 26 ff. By permission of Mrs. John Richard Green.

turned to combats with one another, to a long struggle for overlordship which was to end in bringing about a real national unity.

The West-Saxons, beaten back from their advance along the Severn valley, and overthrown in a terrible defeat at Faddiley, were torn by internal dissensions, even while they were battling for life against the Britons. Strife between the two rival kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira in the north absorbed the power of the Engle in that quarter, till in 588 the strength of Deira suddenly broke down, and the Bernician king, Ethelric, gathered the two peoples into a realm which was to form the later kingdom of Northumbria. Amid the confusion of north and south the primacy among the conquerors was seized by Kent, where the kingdom of the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called Æthelberht, who before 597 established his supremacy over the Saxons of Middlesex and Essex, as well as over the English of East Anglia and of Mercia as far north as the Humber and the Trent.

The overlordship of Æthelberht was marked by a renewal of that intercourse of Britain with the Continent which had been broken off by the conquests of the English. His marriage with Bertha, the daughter of the Frankish King Charibert of Paris, created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul. But the union had far more important results than those of which Æthelberht may have dreamed. Bertha, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a Christian. A Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul to Canterbury, the royal city of the kingdom of Kent; and a ruined Christian Church, the Church of St. Martin, was given them for their worship. The marriage of Bertha was an opportunity which was at once seized by the bishop, who at this time occupied the Roman See, and who is justly known as Gregory the Great. A memorable story tells us how, when but a young Roman deacon, Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair of some youths who stood bound in the market-place of Rome. "From what country do these slaves come?" he asked the traders who brought them. "They are English, Angles!" the slave dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humor. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with faces so angellike! From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchants, "from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable reply, "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their king?" Ella," they told him; and Gregory seized on the words as of good omen. "Alleluia