PART I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

TWO THEORIES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST

THE problem of the racial elements composing English nationality has received extended consideration at the hands of many eminent historians and ethnologists. Indeed, all older writers devoted excessive attention to the question of how far the course of English history has been affected by Celtic, Roman, and Teutonic influences. A great many of them sharply distinguished the Teutons from the Romans, ascribing to the former a peculiar genius for personal liberty and self-government as contrasted with the latter. The adherents to this theory found the illustrations of their doctrines in the history of England and ignored the contradictions to be found everywhere in the history of Germany, the Teutonic country which felt the direct influence of Rome less than did France or England. According to this view, the history of England begins with the story of independent warriors who invaded Britain, swept away the elements of Celtic and Roman culture, and founded a nation of freemen governing themselves through local and national popular assemblies. To be sure, England afterward suffered from feudalism and despotism, but the spirit of liberty inherent in the people finally triumphed over these reactionary forces.

Now this entire theory has been given an importance which its intrinsic worth does not justify, especially in view of the present tendency among scientists to minimize the influence of race as the determining factor in the shaping of institutions. Moreover

the theory, which was largely the outcome of reading democratic ideas of the nineteenth century into very scanty and fragmentary evidences, has been attacked during the last two decades with great energy and erudition. On the other hand, there has appeared an opposing view that the bulk of the English population is Celtic, and that Romano-Celtic institutions persisted in spite of the AngloSaxon-conquest.

This controversy has not led to any very definite results, and the subjects of discussion have lost whatever moral value they were once supposed to have had, for no one now believes that the form of land tenure in Anglo-Saxon times, for example, throws any light at all on the present English land problem. It might as well be admitted that we can never know the numerical proportion of Celts and Teutons in the English nation, for there are no data on which to base a conclusion. While there is still a tendency to hold that the majority were Teutons, there is also a tendency to reject the theory that these Teutons had any particular genius for political liberty or any peculiar institutions which marked them off from other peoples in a primitive stage of culture. The best statement of the problem as it now stands is in a remarkable study of early English institutions by Professor Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond.

§ 1. Statement of the Two Theories1

We are told that "in spite of all the labor that has been spent on the early history of England, scholars are still at variance upon the most fundamental of questions: the question whether that history began with a population of independent freemen or with a population of dependent serfs." Some exception may be taken to this statement. No one denies that for the purposes of English history slavery is a primitive institution, nor that in the seventh and eighth centuries there were many slaves in England. On the other hand, no one will assert that we can ascertain, even approximately, the ratio that the number of slaves bore to the number of free men. Moreover, such terms as "dependent" and 1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 221 ff.

1

"independent" are not words that we can profitably quarrel over, since they are inexact and ambiguous.

For all this, however, it may well be said that there are two main theories before the world. The one would trace the English manor back to the Roman villa, would think of the soil of England as being tilled from the first mainly by men who, when they were not mere slaves, were coloni ascript to the land. The other would postulate the existence of a large number of free men who with their own labor tilled their own soil, of men who might fairly be called free "peasant proprietors," since they were far from rich and had few slaves or servants, and yet who were no mere peasants, since they habitually bore arms in the national host. What may be considered for the moment as a variant on this latter doctrine would place the ownership of the soil, or of large tracts of the soil, not in these free peasants taken as individuals, but in free village communities.

2. Argument for the Second Theory

Now we will say at once that the first of these theories we cannot accept if it be put forward in a general form, if it be applied to the whole or anything like the whole of England. Certainly we are not in a position to deny that in some cases a Roman villa having come into the hands of a Saxon chieftain, he treated the slaves and coloni that he found upon it in much the same way as that in which they had been theretofore treated, though even in such a case the change was in all probability momentous, since large commerce and all that large commerce implies had perished. But against the hypothesis that this was the general case, the English language and the names of our English villages are the unanswered protest. It seems incredible that the bulk of the population should have been of Celtic blood and yet that the Celtic language should not merely have disappeared, but have stamped few traces of itself upon the speech of the conquerors.

This we regard as an objection which goes to the root of the whole matter and which throws upon those who would make the English nation in the main a nation of Celtic bondmen, the burden of strictly proving their thesis. The German invaders must have been numerous. The Britons were no cowards. They contested the soil inch by inch. The struggle was long and arduous. What then, we must ask, became of the mass of the victors? Surely it is impossible that they at once settled down as the "dependent serfs" of their chieftains.