*,f.wt f-^-H* i^fi* hrKf 0 'TALE«'¥]MII¥lEI^SIIirY- Gift of NEW HAVEN HOSPITAL 1929 smjww^wwwvw^i^i'ww^s^yc-^jwwwwwwww'^ww^ '^ THE WORLDS GREAT- CLASSICS I^ 2KE3;E3jC33 X:gJ."'3C37.1 '^ Timothy Dwighx D.D. LLD. Richard Henry5toddard Arthvr Richmond Marsh. A.B. Pav L VAN Dyke.D.D. Albert ElleryBergh ^ (1^ • I LLV5TRATED- WITH NEARLY TWO- x^ i.^ -HVNDREDPHOTOCRAVVB.E5-ETCH'- Sx< •INGS COLORED-PLATES AND- FVLL- • pagepor.trait50fcreatavthor5 • Clarence Cook •• Art Editor. '¦^ •THE- COLONIAL- PR-E5S • NEW-YORK c^ MDCCCXCIX If \%.f^li^fri^a?fsrnVr^tl^rn^rr'Arr^^tn^lrJ!\fr^ \ JOHN RICHARD GREEN. Photogratmre from » photograph. Copyright, 1899, By the colonial PRESS. SPECIAL INTRODUCTION SOME one has said that Carlyle's " French Revolution " is an epic rather than a history. Such a statement may be either a censure or a compliment. It is a censure if it im plies that the historian has allowed his imagination to seduce him from a strict allegiance to truth. It is a compliment if it signifies that imagination and sympathy have selected for the historian the past of which he was to treat, have evoked men and women from dusty manuscripts and obscure books, have caused his heart to throb with their passionate hopes and agonizing re grets, and have guided his pencil as he strove to reproduce the form and pressure of a buried time. In the youth of every peo ple there is a period when history and epic narrative are scarcely distinguishable. Later come the pragmatic or scientific his torians, who, endeavoring to free themselves from partisan bias, relate events simply, deduce principles from facts, and inter weave a philosophy of history with history itself. These latter, however precious they may be to the student, have never charmed the general reader like the poetic historians, for where one man is a philosopher, ten, nay a hundred, are poets ; or, in other words, sober, unadorned reason appeals to but few, while picturesque description, moving incident, and the glow of ardent feeling captivate the many. To the class of poet-his torians, a class of which Herodotus is the first European repre sentative, belongs the author of the " Short History of the English People," John Richard Green. The story of his all too brief life is soon told. He was born at Oxford, December 12, 1837. Sent at eight years old to Mag dalen College School, where, as well as at home, he was indoc trinated with ToryisJtn-and High Church principles, he remained there until he had reached the~sixthlorm. From here he was removed to the charge of two private tutors in succession, Dr. iv HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. Ridgway, and Mr. C. D. Yonge, of Leamington. When he was about fifteen years of age, Mr. Yonge induced him to compete for a scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, which he won. He deferred entering upon residence until 1856, and then devoted himself with ardor to his favorite pursuits, including archaeology and history, somewhat to the neglect of the established curricu lum. While at college he attracted the notice of Dean Stanley, then canon of Christ Church, who took an interest in his studies, and gave him valuable direction with respect to their pursuit. In i860 he entered orders, and became curate of St. Barnabas', King Square, a church in the East End of London. Here, as later (1863) in the desolate parish of Holy Trinity, at Hoxton, and again in a mission-curacy at St. Peter's, Stepney, he labored with intense energy, and to the serious detriment of his health. In 1865 he became vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney, which he some where describes as a "parish of dull straight streets of monoto nous houses, already marked with premature decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and crime." Perceiving the dire need on every hand, he bestowed his own salary in benevolence, and supplemented it by writing articles, often in feverish haste, for the " Saturday Review." He said of his clerical income, " I get 300 pounds,, and it costs me 700 pounds." In August, 1866, the cholera raged in the East End, and he toiled manfully, by day and by night, for the relief of suffering and the burial of the dead. The winter of 1867-68 was one of appalling distress among the poor, and Green found his powers overtaxed by the labors into which he threw himself heart and soul. In 1869 he was forced by disease to resign his living, but he entered at once upon new duties as librarian at Lambeth Palace. Of this time he afterward said, " I had great dreams for awhile of ambition, and then Andrew Clark met me in the street and told me I might die in six months ! " From this period on he found himself obliged to spend much time in the South of France or in Italy, on account of his tendency to consumption. At every interval of leisure he had been assid uously prosecuting his historical studies, and in 1874 appeared his " Short History of the English People." So much care had been lavished upon its composition that when, after repeated re- writings, the greater part of it was already stereotyped, it was SPECIAL INTRODUCTION. v entirely recast in order to satisfy the exacting taste of its author. Its success was instantaneous. In the first year 32,000 copies were sold, and no fewer than 100,000 more before its revision in 1888. Nor was its vogue merely a popular one. It used to be said, we are told, that when men leaving Oxford wished to im prove their minds, if they were rich they travelled, and if they were poor they read Green's " Short History." This, though jestingly said, yet shows the estimate in which the book was held by university men. In 1877 he reprinted some of his early papers as " Stray Studies in England and Italy." He himself though that his most delicate work was in the essay entitled " Buttercups," and his best criticism that on Virgil, both con tained in the volume last mentioned. In 1877 he married Miss Alice Stopford, daughter of Archdeacon Stopford, and in her found a true helpmate, at once intellectual and tender. In 1879 appeared his " Readings from English History." In 1877-80 was published a revision and expansion of his " Short History " in four volumes, under the title, " History of the English Peo ple." In 1880 he and Mrs. Green wrote a " Short Geography of the British Isles." In 1881 he edited " Addison's Select Es says." In 1882 he issued " The Making of England," the ripest fruit of his genius. Of this the first chapter was rewritten ten times before he was satisfied with it, much of the book five times, and other parts three times. In 1882 he left England for Men- tone, and there, growing steadily weaker, died on March 7, 1883. His " Conquest of England " was not published till the end of that year. The man has been sketched for us by one of his associates during his pastoral life in East London, the author of " Music and Morals," Rev. H. R. Haweis : " That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close to gether; the thin mouth, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step ; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative — all this comes vi HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. back to me vividly ! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit ! What a talker ! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he ap proached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman's reception! But how enchanting were my walks with him in the Victoria Park, that one outlet of Stepney and Bethnal Green! I never in my life so lost count of time with any one before or since. ... I have sometimes, after spending the evening with him at my lodgings, walked back to St. Philip's Parsonage, Stepney, towards midnight, talking ; then he has walked back with me in the summer night, talking ; and when the dawn broke it has found us belated somewhere in the lonely Mile End Road, still unexhausted, and still talking." The portrait prefixed to " The Conquest of England," and to the illustrated edition of the " Short History," is said by Mr. Loftie to be " very like in the intensity of the expression, but not so much so in the features." He adds: "The nose was very small, and was overshadowed by the brow of the highly de veloped forehead. In a cloak-room you could always recognize his hat by its extraordinary diameter. The eyes were rather sunk, and were not, I think, quite straight, but no one who ever encountered them could forget their keenness — their appear ance of being able to see through anything. He was very con scious of his own bodily insignificance. . . . He was a great admirer of physical beauty, both in men and women, and es pecially of tallness." Green's merits as a historian have been determined for us by his peers. When his " Short History " first came out, several critics, especially one in " Eraser's Magazine," attacked him on the score of inaccuracy. At first these denunciations pro duced in some quarters an impression unfavorable to his merits, but it was soon apparent that certain errors were trifling and could be easily corrected, and that, for the rest, it was not so much a question of error as of difference of opinion. When all concessions had been made to adverse criticism, it still remained true that the book was hailed with joyful enthusiasm by the reading public, and this verdict has been sustained by the de liberate utterances of the most cautious and scholarly experts. Here, for example, is an extract from an admirable article^ SPECIAL INTRODUCTION. vii published in 1883, by James Bryce, author of " The Ameri can Commonwealth : " " We have no one, and we may not for many years to come have any one, in whom so much knowl edge and so wide a range of interests are united to such ingenu ity, acuteness, originality of view, and to such a power of pre senting results in rich, clear, and pictorial language. . . . The characteristic note of his genius was also that of Gibbon's, the combination of a perfect mastery of multitudinous details with a large and luminous view of those far-reaching forces and relations which govern the fortunes of peoples and guide the course of empire. This width and comprehensiveness, this power of massing for the purposes of argument the facts which his art has just been clothing in its most brilliant hues, is the highest of all a historian's gifts." Another stalwart champion is Gardiner, the historian of England in the seventeenth century : " That which impressed him most in men was that they were alive. That which he saw in history was the continuous life of the race, the change of thought which makes each generation differ from the last. . . . The danger has been that this work might be done in such a way as to repel all but a select circle. Mr. Green has shown that it yields itself to high imaginative treatment. When the faults of his work are pointed out, I feel inclined to answer with Galileo, — ' E pur si muove ' (' And yet it moves ') ." The opinion of Dr."Stubbs, the present bishop of Oxford, is es pecially interesting, because, though in one sense Green'3 mas ter, his temperament, and consequently his style, are widely different from those of Green : " He combined, so far as the his tory of England is concerned, a complete and firm grasp of the subject in its unity and integrity with a wonderful command of details, and a thorough sense of perspective and proportion. All his work was real and original work. . . . Like other people, he made mistakes sometimes; but scarcely ever does the cor rection of his mistakes affect either the essence of the picture or the force of the argument." Green was so impressionable as to be a man of his generation. In this respect he differs, for example, from Tennyson and Browning. Like Victor Hugo and Renan, he was reared under conservative influences, but soon forsook Toryism for liberal viii HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. principles, and, while never ceasing to respect and love the church, grew gradually to lead a life independent of it. Like Taine, he was an ardent student of physical geography and an exponent of its effects upon the history of his people. Like both Taine and Renan, and, we may add, Michelet, he had the gift of luminous exposition, of vivid description, and of rapid move ment; like them, too, he had reasoned out the philosophy of his subject, but expounded it, for the most part, only by the course of his narrative. Poet that he was, his design, his drift, was in wrought into the very substance of hi- :\7ork. One feels it as the animating spirit of the whole, and is not too eager to con template it as an abstraction. Yet, if curiosity respecting the novelty of his conception is aroused, it might best be gratified by Green's own words : " The aim of the following work is de fined by its title ; it is a history, not of English Kings or Eng lish Conquests, but of the English People. ... If some of the conventional figures of military and political history occupy in my pages less than the space usually given them, it is because I have had to find a place for figures little heeded in common history — the figures of the missionary, the poet, the printer, the merchant, or the philosopher." It is this which endears the author and his book to us. He depicts, and nobly depicts, the vicissitudes — the struggles, the defeats, the triumphs — which mark the gradual emergence of a great. people from under the shadow of the successive despot isms which have sought to enthrall and oppress it. He had learned to know and love the poor, in all their mistry and squalor, by his work among them; and he devote'd his life to them even more effectively by the composition of his "His tory." He is the spokesman, the herald, of the advancing Peo ple, and while wrong yet remains to be redressed, the epic of their slow and as yet incomplete deliverance xnU be dear to them. Loving music, painting, natural scenery, and little children, and devoid of that verbal memory the lack" of v/hich must have sadly hampered him in his undertaking, he devoted himself, under the stress of bodily pain and weakness, and in the face of rapidly approaching death, to the service of humanity. To quote his own words to another : " To work well we must look SPECIAL INTRODUCTION. ix to the end — not death, but the good of mankind." And so he labored to the last. That it was in the spirit of the Master and Friend of men we need no other testimony than his book itself; yet it is pleasant to find his confession recorded in a letter to a friend : " What seems to grow fairer to me as life goes by is the love and grace and tenderness of it ; not its wit, and cleverness, and grandeur of knowledge — grand as knowledge is — but just the laughter of little children, and the friendship of friends, and the cosy talk by the fireside, and the sight of flowers, and the sound of music." Albert S. Cook. GREEN'S PREFACE THE aim of the following work is defined by its title; it is a history not of English Kings or English Conquests, but of the English People. At the risk of sacrificing much that was interesting and attractive in itself, and which the constant usage of our historians has. made familiar to English readers, I have preferred to pass lightly and briefly over the details of foreign wars and diplomacies, the personal adventures of kings and nobles, the pomp of courts, or the intrigues of favorites, and to dwell at length on the incidents of that constitutional, intellect ual, and social advance in which we read the history of the na tion itself. It is with this purpose that I have devoted more space to Chaucer than to Crecy, to Caxton than to the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the Poor Law of Eliza beth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Methodist revival than to the escape of the Young Pretender. Whatever the worth of the present work may be, I have striven throughout that it should never sink into a " drum and trumpet history." It is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow-men. But war plays a small part in the real story of Eu ropean nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any. The only war which has profoundly affected English society and English government is the Hundred Years' War with France, and of that war the results were simply evil. If I have said little of the glories of Crecy, it is because I have dwelt much on the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland and the preaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I have never shrunk from telling at length the triumphs of peace. I have restored to their place among the achievements of Englishmen the " Faerie Queen " and the " Novum Or- ganum." I have set Shakspere among the heroes of the Eliza bethan age and placed the scientific inquiries of the Royal So ciety side by side with the victories of the New Model. If some xii HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. of the conventional figures of mihtary and political history oc cupy in my pages less than the space usually given them, it is because I have had to find a place for figures little heeded in common history — the figures of the missionary, the poet, the printer, the merchant, or the philosopher. In England, more than elsewhere, constitutional progress has been the result of social development. In a brief summary of our history such as the present, it was impossible to dwell as I could have wished to dwell on every phase of this development ; but I have endeavored to point out at great crises, such as those of the Peasant Revolt or the Rise of the New Monarchy, how much of our political history is the outcome of social changes ; and throughout I have drawn greater attention to the religious, intellectual, and industrial progress of the nation itself than has, so far as I remember, ever been done in any previous history of the same extent. The scale of the present work has hindered me from giving in detail the authorities for every statement. But I have pre fixed to each section a short critical account of the chief con temporary authorities for the period it represents as well as of the most useful modern works in which it can be studied. As I am writing for English readers of a general class I have thought it better to restrict myself in the latter case to English books, or to English translations of foreign works where they exist. This is a rule which I have only broken in the occasional mention of French books, such as those of Guizot or Mignet, well known and within reach of ordinary students. I greatly regret that the publication of the first volume of the invaluable Constitutional History of Professor Stubbs came too late for me to use it in my account of those early periods on which it has thrown so great a light. I am only too conscious of the faults and oversights in a work, much of which has been written in hours of weakness and ill health. That its imperfections are not greater than they are, I owe to the kindness of those who have from time to time aided me with suggestions and corrections ; and especially to my dear friend Mr. E. A. Freeman, who has never tired of helping me with counsel and criticism. Thanks for like friendly help are due to Professor Stubbs and Professor Bryce, and in literary matters to the Rev. Stopford Brooke, whose wide knowledge and refined taste have been of the greatest service to me. CHOICE EXAMPLES OF BOOK ILLUMINATION. Fac-similes from Illuminated Manuscripts and Illustrated BookS of Early Date. MINIATURE ILLUSTRATING 81st PSALM. From a Psalterium of English work, written about 1450. ' This plate is a fine specimen of purely English work of a period not much later . than the middle of the fifteenth century. These specimens have for their miniattires- diapered backgrounds such as are found in connection with the French Bible of .1370. The employment of green tints in the coloring is a noticeable feature. ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE John Richard Green (Portrait) , . . p^,„usfi,,. Photogravure from a photograph Miniature Illustrating Eighty-First Psalm . , xii Fac-simile Illumination of the Fifteenth Century A Page from the Prayer-Book of the Emperor Maximilian 144 Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century Shakespeare at the Court of Elizabeth . . , 268 Photogravure from a painting Mary Stuart and Rizzio 348 Photogravure from a painting A SHORT HISTORY of THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. CHAPTER I. THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. Section I. — Britain and the English.* FOR the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the penin sula which parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little town ships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sun less woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk of whom lay probably along the middle Elbe and on the Weser. To the north of the English in their Sleswick home lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their * Authorities. — For the constitution and settlement of the English, see Kemble's " Saxons in England " and especially the " Constitutional History of England " by Dr. Stubbs. Sir Francis Palgrave's " History of the English Commonwealth " is valuable, but to be used with care. A vigorous and accurate sketch of the early constitution may be found in Mr. Freeman's " History of the Norman Conquest," vol. i. See also " The Making of England " and " The Conquest of England" by J. R. Green. Vol. I.— I. I 2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. district of Jutland. To the south of them a number of German tribes had drawn together in their home-land between the Elbe and the Ems, and in a wide tract across the Ems to the Rhine, into the people cf the Saxons. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family ; and at the moment when history discovers them, they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. Each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live ; and it is from the union of all of them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung. Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little. But, from the glimpses which we catch of them when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain, their political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. The basis of their society was the free man. He alone was known as "the man," or "the churl ;" and two phrases set his freedom vividly before us. He was "the free-necked man," whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. He was " the weaponed man," who alone bore spear and sword, for he alone possessed the right which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage, the right of private war. Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we catch traces this right of self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The "blood- wite," or compensation in money for personal wrong, was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye for eye," ran the rough cus tomary code, and "limb for limb," or for each fair damages. We see a further step towards the recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man, but to the people at large, in another custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each little THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 3 group of English people upon the blood-bond which knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by all who were linked by blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been done against all who were linked by blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of the value of the family bond, as a means of restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess, sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with and pay for him, if wrong were done. So fully was this principle recognized that, even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges ; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his guilt thai he had to stand or fall. The blood-bond gave both its military and social form to Old English society. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick" or "ham" or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelt together in it. The home or "ham" of the Billings would be Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings would be Harlington. But in such settlements, the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly the freeholder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of the community to which he belonged was inseparable from the possession of his "holding." The landless man ceased for all practical purposes to be free, though he was no man's slave. In the very eariiest glimpse we get of the German race we see them a race of land-holders and land-tillers. Tacitus, the first Roman who sought to know these destined conquerors of Rome, describes them as pastur ing on the forest glades around their villages, and ploughing their village fields. A feature which at once struck him as parting them from the civilized world to which he himself belonged, was their hatred of cities, and their love even within 4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. their little settlements of a jealous independence. "They live apart," he says, " each by himself, as woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him." And as each dweller within the settle ment was jealous of his own isolation and independence among his fellow settlers, so each settlement was jealous of its inde pendence among its fellow settlements. Of the character of their life in this early world, however, we know little save what may be gathered from the indications of a later time. Each little farmer commonwealth was girt in by its own border or "mark," a belt of forest or waste or fen which parted it from its fellow villages, a ring of common ground which none of its settlers might take for his own, but which sometimes served as a death-ground where criminals met their doom, and was held to be the special dweUing-place of the nixie and the will-o'- the-wisp. If a stranger came through this wood, or over this waste, custom bade him blow his horn as he came, for if he stole through secretly he was taken for a foe and any man might lawfully slay him. Inside this boundary the " town ship," as the village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that served as its simple fortification, formed a ready-made fortress in war, while in peace its entrenchments were serviceable in the feuds of village with village, or house with house. Within the village we find from the first a marked social difference between two orders of its indwellers. The bulk of its homesteads were those of its freemen or "ceorls ;" but amongst these were the larger homes of "eorls," or men distinguished among their fellows by noble blood, who were held in an hereditary reverence, and from the leaders of the village were chosen in war time, or rulers in time of peace. But the choice was a purely voluntary one, and the man of noble blood enjoyed no legal privilege among his fellows. The holdings of the freemen clustered round a moot-hill or sacred tree where the community met from time to time to order its own industry and to frame its own laws. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man to man. Here strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its "elder men" stated them, and the wrong doer was judged and his fine assessed by the kinsfolk; and here men were chosen to follow headman or ealdorman to hundred court or war. It is with a reverence such as is stirred THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 5 by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one looks back to these tiny moots, where the men of the village met to order the village life and the village industry, as their descendants, the men of a later England, meet in Parliament at Westminster, to frame laws and do justice for the great empire which has sprung from this little body of farmer-com monwealths in Sleswick. The religion of the English was the same as that of the whole German family. Christianity, which had by this time brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire, had not penetrated as yet among the forests of the North. Our own names for the days of the week still recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped. Wednesday is the day of Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways and boundaries, the inventor of letters, the common god of the whole conquering people, whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Thursday is the day of Thunder, or, as the Northmen called him, Thor, the god of air and storm and rain; as Friday is Frea's-day, the god of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday may commemorate an obscure god Sstere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death. Behind these floated dim shapes of an older mythology ; Eostre, the goddess of the dawn, or of the spring, who lends her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection ; "Wyrd," the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the "weird" of northern superstition ; or the Shield-Maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us, "wrought on the battle-field their toil, and hurled the thrilling javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or the hero-gods of legend and song ; " Nicor," the water-sprite, who gave us our water-nixies and "Old Nick" ; "Weland," the forger of mighty shields and sharp-biting swords, whose memory lingers in the stories of "Weyland's Smithy" in Berkshire; while the name of Ailesbury may preserve the last trace of the legend of We- land's brother, the sun-archer .^gil. But it is only in broken fragments that this mass of early faith and early poetry still lives for us, in a name, in the gray stones of a cairn, or in snatches of our older song : and the faint traces of worship or of priesthood which we find in later history show how lightly it clung to the national life. 6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. t4io From Sleswick and the shores of the Northern Sea we must pass, before opening our story, to land which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by Enghsh feet. The island of Britain had for nearly four hundred years been a province of the Empire. A descent of Julius Caesar revealed it (e.g. 55) to the Roman world, but nearly a century elapsed before the Emperor Claudius attempted its definite conquest. The victories of Julius Agricola (a.d. 78 — 84) car ried the Roman frontier to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde, and the work of Roman civilization followed hard upon the Roman sword. Population was grouped in cities such as York or Lincoln, cities governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a network of roads which extended from one end of the island to the other. Commerce sprang up in ports like that of London ; agriculture flourished till Britain was able at need to supply the necessities of Gaul ; its mineral resources were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset and Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. The wealth of the island grew fast during -centuries of unbroken peace, but the evils which were slowly sapping the strength of the Roman Empire at large must have told heavily on the real wealth of the province of Britain. Here, as in Italy or Gaul, the popu lation probably declined as .the estates of the landed proprietors grew larger, and the cultivators sank into serfs whose cabins clustered round the luxurious villas of their lords. The mines, if worked by forced labor, must have been a source of endless oppression. Town and country were alike crushed by heavy taxation, while industry was fettered by laws that turned every trade into an hereditary caste. Above all, the purely despotic system of the Roman Government, by crushing all local inde pendence, crushed all local vigor. Men forgot how to fight for their country when they forgot how to govern it. Such causes of decay were common to every province of the Empire ; but there were others that sprang from the peculiar circumstances of Britain itself. The island was weakened by a disunion within, which arose from the partial character of its civilization. It was only in the towns that the conquered Britons became entirely Romanized. Over large tracts of country the rural Britons seemed to have remained apart, speaking their own tongue, owning some traditional allegiance 410] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 7 to their native chiefs, and even retaining their native laws. The use of the Roman language may be taken as marking the progress of Roman civilization, and though Latin had wholly superseded the language of the conquered peoples in Spain or Gaul, its use seems to have been confined in Britain to the townsfolk and the wealthier landowners without the towns. The dangers that sprang from such a severance between the two elements of the population must have been stirred into active life by the danger which threatened Britain from the North. The Picts who had been sheltered from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Llighlands were roused in their turn to attack by the weakness of the province and the hope of plunder. Their invasion penetrated to the heart of the island. Raids so extensive could hardly have been effected without help from within, and the dim history of the time allows us to see not merely an increase of disunion between the Romanized and un-Romanized population of Britain, but even an alliance between the last and their free kinsfolk, the Picts. The struggles of Britain, however, lingered on till dangers nearer home forced the Empire to recall its legions and leave the province to itself. Ever since the birth of Christ the countries which lay round the Mediterranean Sea, and which then comprehended the whole of the civilized world, had rested in peace beneath the rule of Rome. During four hundred years its frontier had held at bay the barbarian world without — the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine. It was this mass of savage barbarism that at last broke in on the Empire as it sank into decay. In the western dominions of Rome the triumph of the invaders was complete. The Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths con quered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths ruled at last in Italy itself. And now that the fated hour was come, the Saxon and the Engle too closed upon their prey. It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in 410 recalled her legions from Britain. The province, thus left unaided, seems to have fought bravely against its assailants, and once at least to have driven back the Picts to their moun tains in a rising of despair. But the threat of fresh inroads 8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [449 found Britain torn with civil quarrels which made a united resistance impossible, while its Pictish enemies strengthened themselves by a league with marauders from Ireland (Scots as they were then called), whose pirate-boats were harrying the western coast of the island, and with a yet more formidable race of pirates who had long been pillaging along the British Channel. These were the English. We do not know whether it was the pressure of other tribes or the example of their German brethren who were now moving in a general attack on the Empire from their forest homes, or simply the barren ness of their coast, which drove the hunters, farmers, fisher men, of the English tribes to sea. But the daring spirit of their race already broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of their swoop, in the fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time, "fierce beyond other foes, and cunning as they are fierce ; the sea is their school of war, and the storm their friend ; they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world." To meet the league of Pict, Scot, and Saxon by the forces of the province itself became im possible ; and the one course left was to imitate the fatal policy by which the Empire had invited its own doom while striving to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. The rulers of Britain resolved to break the league by detaching from it the freebooters who were harrying her eastern coast, and to use their new allies against the Pict. By the usual promises of land and pay, a band of warriors from Jutland were drawn for this purpose in 449 to the shores of Britain, with their chiefs, Hengest and Horsa, at their head. Section II. — The English Conquest. 449 — 577.* It was with the landing of Hengest and his war-band at Ebbsfleet on the shores of the Isle of Thanet that English history begins. No spot in Britain can be so sacred to English men as that which first felt the tread of English feet. There is Httle indeed to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere * Authorities for the Conquest of Britain.— The only extant British ac count is that of the monk Gildds, diffuse and inflated, but valuable as the one authority for the state of the island at the time, and as giving, in the conclusion of his work, the native story of the conquest of Kent. I have examined his general character, and the objections to his au- 449] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 9 lift of higher ground, with a few gray cottages dotted over it, cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But taken as a whole, the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay; far away to the left, across gray marsh-levels, where smoke-wreaths mark the sites of Richborough and Sandwich, the coast-line bends dimly to the fresh rise of cliffs beyond Deal. Everything in the character of the ground confirms the national tradition which fixed here the first landing-place of our English fathers, for great as the physical changes of the country have been since the fifth century, they have told little on its main features. It is easy to discover in the misty level of the present Minster marsh what was once a broad inlet of sea parting Thanet from the mainland of Britain, through which the pirate-boats of the first Englishmen came sailing with a fair wind to the little gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet ; and Richborough, a fortress whose broken ramparts still rise above the gray flats which have taken the place of this older sea-channel, was the common landing-place of travellers from Gaul. If the war-ships of the pirates therefore were cruising off the coast at the moment when the bargain with the Britons was concluded, their dis embarkation at Ebbsfleet almost beneath the walls of Rich borough would be natural enough. But the after-current of events serves to show that the choice of this landing-place was the result of a settled design. Between the Briton and his hireling soldiers there could be little trust. Quarters in Thanet would satisfy the followers of Hengest, who still lay in sight of their fellow-pirates in the Channel, and who felt themselves secured against the treachery which had so often proved fatal to the barbarian by the broad inlet which parted their camp thenticity, &c., in two papers in the Saturday Review for April 24 and May 8, 1869. The conquest of Kent is the only one of which we have any record from the side of the conquered. The English conquerors have left brief jottings of the conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex, in the curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now known as the " English Chronicle." They are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. We possess no materials for the history of the English in their invasion of Mid-Britain or Mercia, and a fragment of the annals of Northumbria embodied in_ the later compilation which bears the name of Nennius alone throws lightupon their actions in the North. Dr. Guest's papers in the Origines Celticse " are the best modern narratives of the conquest The story has since been told by Mr. Green in " The Making of England. lo HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [455 from the mainland. Nor was the choice less satisfactory to the provincial, trembling — and, as the event proved, justly trembling — lest in his zeal against the Pict he had introduced an even fiercer foe into Britain. His dangerous allies were cooped up in a corner of the land, and parted from it by a sea-channel which was guarded by the strongest fortresses of the coast. The need of such precautions was seen in the dispute which arose as soon as the work for which the mercenaries had been hired was done. The Picts were hardly scattered to the winds in a great battle when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their numbers probably grew fast as the news of the settle ment spread among the pirates in the Channel, and with the increase of their number must have grown the difficulty of supplying rations and pay. The dispute which rose over these questions was at last closed by Hengest's men with a threat of war. The threat, however, as we have seen, was no easy one to carry out. Right across their path in any attack upon Britain stretched the inlet of sea that parted Thanet from the mainland, a strait which was then traversable only at low water by a long and dangerous ford, and guarded at either mouth by the fortresses of Richborough and Reculver. The channel of the Medway, with the forest of the Weald bending round it from the south, furnished another line of defence in the rear, while strongholds on the sites of our Canterbury and Rochester guarded the road to London; and all around lay the soldiers placed at the command of the Count of the Saxon Shore, to hold the coast against the barbarian. Great however as these difficulties were, they failed to check the sudden onset of the Jutes. The inlet seems to have been crossed, the coast- road to London seized, before any force could be collected to oppose the English advance ; and it was only when they passed the Swale and looked to their right over the potteries whose refuse still strews the mudbanks of Upchurch, that their march seems to have swerved abruptly to the south. The guarded walls of Rochester probably forced them to turn southwards along the ridge of low hills which forms the eastern boundary of the Medway valley. Their way led them through a district full of memories of a past which had even then faded from the minds of men; for the hill-slopes which they traversed were the grave-ground of a vanished race, and scattered among 455] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. n the boulders that strewed the ground rose the cromlechs and huge barrows of the dead. One mighty relic survives in the monument now called Kit's Coty House, which had been linked in old days by an avenue of huge stones to a burial-ground near Addington. It was from a steep knoll on which the gray weather-beaten stones of this monument are reared that the view of their first battle-field would break on the English warriors; and a lane which still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads would guide them across the ford which has left its name in the little village of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of the fight that went struggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa fell in the moment of victory, and the flint-heap of Horsted, which has long pre served his name, and was held in after-time to mark his grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valor of which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck the key-note of the whole English conquest of Britain. The massacre which followed the battle indicated at once the merciless nature of the struggle which had begun. While the wealthier Kentish landowners fled in panic over sea, the poorer Britons took refuge in hill and forest till hunger drove them from their lurking-places to be cut down or enslaved by their conquerors. It was in vain that some sought shelter within the walls of their churches; for the rage of the English seems to have burned fiercest against the clergy. The priests were slain at the altar, the churches fired, the peasants driven by the flames to fling themselves on a ring of pitiless steel. It is a picture such as this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Frank, or of Italy by the Lombard, proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank, but of the Gaul whom he overcame ; and the fair hair of the Lombard is now all but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest for a hundred and fifty years was a sheer dispossession and driving back of the people whom the English conquered. In the world-wide struggle between Rome and the German 12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [465 invaders no land was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly won. The conquest of Britain was indeed only partly wrought out after two centuries of bitter warfare. But it was just through the long and merciless nature of the struggle that of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and com plete. So far as the English sword in these earlier days reached, Britain became England, a land, that is, not of Britons, but of Enghshm'en. It is possible that a few of the vanquished people may have lingered as slaves round the homesteads of their English conquerors, and a few of their household words (if these were not brought in at a later time) mingled oddly with the English tongue. But doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main facts untouched. When the steady prog ress of English conquest was stayed for a while by civil wars a century and a half after Aylesford, the Briton had disap peared from half of the land which had been his own, and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his English conqueror reigned without a rival from Essex to the Peak of Derbyshire and the mouth of the Severn, and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth. Aylesford, however, was but the first step in this career of conquest. How stubborn the contest was may be seen from the fact that it took sixty years to complete the conquest of Southern Britain alone. It was twenty years before Kent itself was won. After a second defeat at the passage of the Cray, the Britons "forsook Kent-land and fled with much fear to London; " but the ground was soon won back again, and it was not until 465 that a series of petty conflicts made way for a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so terrible that all hope of saving the bulk of Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was only on its southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Eight years later the long contest was over, and with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first conqueror was done. But the greed of plunder drew fresh war-bands from the German coast. New invaders, drawn from among the Saxon tribes that lay between the Elbe and the Rhine, were seen in 477, only four years later, pushing slowly along the strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the Weald and the sea. Nowhere has the 491] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 13 physical aspect of the country been more utterly changed. The vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste -vtrhich then bore the name of the Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames, and leaving only a thin strip of coast along its southern edge. This coast was guarded by a great fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman conqueror. The fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons ; "iElle and Cissa," ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, " beset Ande rida, and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterwards one Briton left." Another tribe of the Saxons was at the same time conquering on the other side of Kent, to the north of the estuary of the Thames, and had founded the settlement of the East-Saxons, as these warriors came to be called, in the valleys of the Colne and the Stour. To the northward of the Stour, the work of conquest was taken up by the third of the tribes whom we have seen dwelling in their German homeland, whose name was destined to absorb that of Saxon or Jute, and to stamp itself on the land they won. These were the Engle, or Englishmen. Their first descents seem to have fallen on the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by the Wash and the Fens and long reaches of forest, the later East Anglia, where the conquerors settled as the North-folk and the South-folk, names still preserved to us in the modern coun ties. With this settlement the first stage in the conquest was complete. By the close of the fifth century the whole coast of Britain, from the Wash to Southampton Water, was in the hands of the invaders. As yet, however, the enemy had touched little more than the coast ; great masses of woodland or of fen still prisoned the Engle, the Saxon, and the Jute alike within narrow limits. But the sixth century can hardly have long begun when each of the two peoples who had done the main work of conquest opened a fresh attack on the flanks of the tract they had won. On its northern flank the Engle appeared in the estuaries of the Forth and of the Humber. On its western flank, the Saxons appeared in the Southampton Water. The true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of Saxons, a tribe whose older name was that of the Gewissas, but who were to be more widely known as the 14 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [495 West-Saxons. Landing westward of the strip of coast which had been won by the war-bands of ^Elle, they struggled under Cerdic and Cynric up from Southampton Water in 495 to the great downs where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Five thousand Britons fell in a fight which opened the country to these invaders, and a fresh victory at Charford in 519 set the crown of the West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. We know little of the incidents of these conquests ; nor do we know why at this juncture they seem to have been suddenly inter rupted. But it is certain that a victory of the Britons at Mount Badon in the year 520 checked the progress of the West- Saxons, and was followed by a long pause in their advance; for thirty years the great belt of woodland which then curved round from Dorset to the valley of the Thames seems to have barred the way of the assailants. What finally broke their inaction we cannot tell. We only know that Cynric, whom Cerdic's death left king of the West-Saxons, again took up the work of invasion by a new advance in 552. The capture of the hill-fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire Downs ; and pushing northward to a new battle at Barbury Hill, they completed the conquest of the Marlborough Downs. From the bare uplands the invaders turned eastward to the richer valleys of our Berkshire, and after a battle with the Kentish men at Wimbledon, the land south of the Thames which now forms our Surrey was added to their dominions. The road along the Thames was however barred to them, for the district round London seems to have been already won and colonized by the East-Saxons. But a march of their King Cuthwulf made them masters in 571 of the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire; and a few years later they swooped from the Wiltshire uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings to re sist this onset, became the spoil of a Saxon victory at Deorham in 577, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Under a new king, CeawHn, the West- Saxons penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin, recently again brought to light, went up in flames. A British poet sings piteously the death- song of Uriconium, " the white town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodland, the hall 550] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 15 of its chieftain left " without fire, without light, without songs," the silence broken only by the eagle's scream, " the eagle who has swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyftdylan the fair." The raid, however, was repulsed, and the blow proved fatal to the power of Wessex. Though the West-Saxons were destined in the end to win the overlordship over every English people, their time had not come yet, and the leadership of the English race was to fall, for nearly a century to come, to the tribe of invaders whose fortunes we have now to follow. Rivers were the natural inlets by which the northern pirates everywhere made their way into the heart of Europe. In Britain the fortress of London barred their way along the Thames from its mouth, and drove them, as we have seen, to an advance along the southern coast and over the downs of Wiltshire, before reaching its upper waters. But the rivers which united in the estuary of the Humber led like open high ways into the heart of Britain, and it was by this inlet that the great mass of the invaders penetrated into the interior of the island. Like the invaders of East Anglia, they were of the English tribe from Sleswick. As the storm fell in the opening of the sixth century on the Wolds of Lincolnshire that stretch southward from the Humber, the conquerors who settled in the deserted country were known as the " Lindiswara," or " dwellers about Lindum." A part of the warriors who had entered the Humber, turned southward by the forest of Elmet which covered the district around Leeds, followed the course of the Trent. Those who occupied the wooded country between the Trent and the Humber took from their position the name of Southumbrians. A second division, advancing along the curve of the former river and creeping down the line of its tributary, the Soar, till they reached Leicester, became known as the Middle-English. The marshes of the Fen country were settled by tribes known as the Gyrwas. The head waters of the Trent were the seat of those invaders who penetrated furthest to the west, and camped round Lichfield and Repton. This country became the borderiand between Englishmen and Britons, and the settlers bore the name of " Mercians," men, that is, of the March or border. We know hardly anything of this conquest of Mid-Britain, and little more of the conquest of the North. Under the Romans, political power had centred in the vast district between the 16 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [55° Humber and the Forth. York had been the capital of Britain and the seat of the Roman prefect ; and the bulk of the gar rison maintained in the island lay cantoned along the Roman wall. Signs of wealth and prosperity appeared everywhere; cities rose beneath the shelter of the Roman camps; villas of British landowners studded the vale of the Ouse and the far-off uplands of the Tweed, where the shepherd trusted for security against Pictish marauders to the terror of the Roman name. This district was assailed at once from the north and from the south. A part of the invading force which entered the Humber marched over the Yorkshire wolds to found a kingdom, which was known as that of the Deiri, in the fens of Holderness and on the chalk downs eastward of York. But they were soon drawn onwards, and after a struggle of which we know nothing, York, like its neighbor cities, lay a desolate ruin, while the conquerors spread northward, slaying and burning along the valley of the Ouse. Meanwhile the pirates had appeared in the Forth, and won their way along the Tweed ; Ida and the men of fifty keels which followed him reared the capital of the northernmost kingdom of the English, that of Bernicia, on the rock of Bamborough, and won their way slowly along the coast against a stubborn resistance which formed the theme of British songs. The strife between the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia for supremacy in the North was closed by their being united under King ^thelric of Bernicia ; and from this union was formed a new kingdom, the kingdom of Northumbria. It was this century of conquest by the English race which really made Britain England. In our anxiety to know more of our fathers, we listen to the monotonous plaint of Gildas, the one writer whom Britain has left us, with a strange disappoint ment. Gildas had seen the invasion of the pirate hosts, and it is to him we owe our knowledge of the conquest of Kent. But we look in vain to his book for any account of the life or settlement of the English conquerors. Across the border of the new England that was growing up along the southern shores of Britain, Gildas gives us but a glimpse — doubtless he had but a glimpse himself — of forsaken walls, of shrines polluted by heathen impiety. His silence and his ignorance mark the character of the struggle. No British neck had as yet bowed before the English invader, no British pen was to 577] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 17 record his conquest. A century after their landing the English are still known to their British foes only as "barbarians," " wolves," " dogs," " whelps from the kennel of barbarism/' " hateful to God and man." Their victories seemed victories of the powers of evil, chastisements of a divine justice for national sin. Their ravage, terrible as it had been, was held to be almost at an end: in another century— so ran old prophecies— their last hold on the land would be shaken off. But of submission to, or even of intercourse with the strangers there is not a word. Gildas tells us nothing of their fortunes, or of their leaders. In spite of his silence, however, we may still know something of the way in which the new English society grew up in the conquered country, for the driving back of the Briton was but the prelude to the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new England is, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain, or Gaul, or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, adminis trative order, still remained Roman. In Britain alone Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organiza tion of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. The villas, the mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a Roman world which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners, its faith, went with it. The new England was a heathen country. The religion of Woden and Thunder triumphed over the religion of Christ. Alone among the German assailants of Rome the English rejected the faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow. Elsewhere the Christian priesthood served as mediators between the bar barian and the conquered, but in the conquered part of Britain Christianity wholly disappeared. River and homestead and boundary, the very days of the week, bore the names of the new gods who displaced Christ. But if England seemed for the moment a waste from which all the civilization of the world had fled away, it contained within itself the germs of a nobler life than that which had been destroyed. The base of the new English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or Sacrificing for himself in his far-off father land by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt while Vol. I.— 2 i8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [588 the struggle went on with the material civilization of Britain, it was impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War was no sooner over than the warrior settled down into a farmer, and the home of the peasant churl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he had burnt. Little knots of kinsfolk drew together ifi " tun " and "ham " beside the Thames and the Trent as they had settled beside the Elbe or the Weser, not as kinsfolk only, but as dwellers in the same plot, knit together by their common holding within the same bounds. Each little village-common wealth lived the same life in Britain as its farmers had lived at home. Each had its moot-hill or sacred tree as a centre, its " mark" as a border; each judged by witness of the kins folk and made laws in the assembly of its freemen, and chose the leaders for its own governance, and the men who were to follow headman or ealdorman to hundred court or war. In more ways than one, indeed, the primitive organization of English society was affected by its transfer to the soil of Britain. Conquest begat the King. It is probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their own fatherland, where each tribe lived under the rule of its own customary ealdorman. But in a war such as that which they waged against the Britons it was necessary to find a common leader whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Kent or Wessex might follow ; and such a leader soon rose into a higher position than that of a temporary chief. The sons of Hengest became kings in Kent; those of .^lle in Sussex; the West-Saxons chose Cerdic for their king. Such a choice at once drew the various villages and tribes of each community closer together than of old, while the new ruler surrounded himself with a chosen war-band of companions, servants, or " thegns " as they were called, who were rewarded for their service by gifts from the public land. Their distinc tion rested, not on hereditary rank, but on service done to the King, and they at last became a nobility which superseded the " eorls " of the original English constitution. And as war begat the King and the military noble, so it all but begat the slave. There had always been a slave class, a class of the unfree, among the English as among all German peoples; but the numbers of this class, if unaffected by the conquest of Britain, were swelled by the wars which soon sprang up 588] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 19 among the English conquerors. No rank saved the prisoner taken in battle from the doom of slavery, and slavery itself was often welcomed as saving the prisoner from death. We see this in the story of a noble warrior who had fallen wounded in a fight between two English tribes, and was carried as a bond-slave to the house of a thegn hard by. He declared him self a peasant, but his master penetrated the disguise. " You deserve death," he said, " since all my brothers and kinsfolk fell in the fight;" but for his oath's sake he spared his life and sold him to a Frisian at London, probably a merchant such as those who were carrying English captives at that time to the market-place of Rome. But war was not the only cause of the increase of this slave class. The number of the " unfree " were swelled by debt and crime. Famine drove men to " bend their heads in the evil days for meat ;" the debtor unable to discharge his debt flung on the ground the freeman's sword and spear, took up the laborer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kins folk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father, pressed by need, sold children and wife into bondage. The slave became part of the live-stock of the estate, to be willed away at death with horse or ox whose pedigree was kept as carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even the freeman's children by a slave-mother inherited the mother's taint. " Mine is the calf that is born of my cow," ran the English proverb. The cabins of the unfree clustered round the home of the rich landowner as they had clustered round the villa of the Roman gentleman; ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, ox herd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not such a slavery as that we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare ; if the slave were slain, it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his lord could slay him if he would ; it was but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in the justice- court, no kinsman to claim vengeance for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, " his skin paid for him " under the lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and flogged to death for his crime, or burned to death if the slave were a woman. 20 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [588 Section III.— The Northumbrian Kingdom, 588—685.* The conquest of the bulk of Britain was now complete. Eastward of a fine which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberiand and Yorkshire, through Derby shire 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 Eng lish 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 towards each other. Freed to a great extent from the common pressure of the war against the Britons, their energies 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 val ley, 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, .Sthelric, gathered the two peoples into a rejllm 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 * Authorities. — Bseda's " Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum " is the one primary authority for this period. I have spoken fully of it and its writer in the text. The meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the West-Saxons have been brought by numerous insertions from Baeda to the shape in which they at present appear in the " English Chronicle." The poetn of Csedttlon has been published by Mf. Thorpe, and copious summaries of it are given by Sharon Turner (" Hist, of Anglo-Saxons," vol. iii. cap. 3) and Mr. Morley (" English Writers," vol. i.). The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, and those of Cuthbert by Beeda and an earlier contetnporary biographer, which are appended to Mr. Stevenson's edition of the " Historia Ecclesiastica," throw great light on the religious condition of the North. For Guthlac of Crowland, see the " Acta Sanctorum " for April xi. For Theodore, and the Eng lish church which he organized, see Kemble (" Saxons in England," vol. ii. cap. 8-10), and above all the invaluable remarks of Dr. Stubbs in his " Constitutional History." 597] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 21 kingdom of the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called ^thelberht, who before 597 established his su premacy 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 yEthelberht 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 Prankish King Charibert of Paris, created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul. But the union had far more important results than those of which .lEthelberht may have dreamed. Bertha, like her Prankish 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 an swered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humor. " Not Angles but Angels," he said, " with faces so angel-like ! From what country come they?" "They come," said the mer chants, " from Deira." " De ira ! " was the untranslatable re ply ; " 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 shall be sung in .^Ella's land ! " he cried, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought to sing it. Only three or four years had gone by, when the deacon had become Bishop of Rome, and Bertha's marriage gave him the opening he sought. After cautious negotiations with the rulers of Gaul, he sent a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the gospel to the Eng lish people. The missionaries landed in 597 on the very spot where Hengest had landed more than a century before in the Isle of Thanet ; and the king received them sitting in the open 22 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [597 air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of Canter bury. He listened to the long sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him from Gaul translated it. " Your words are fair," ^thelberht repHed at last with English good sense, " but they are new and of doubtful mean ing ; " for himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter and protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the Htany of their church. " Turn from this city. Lord," they sang, " Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic ear nestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place, " Alleluia ! " It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest should be yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure the reversal and undoing of the first. " Strangers from Rome '' was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was, in one sense, the return of the Roman legions who had retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only but of such men as his own Jutish fathers had slaughtered and driven over sea that ^thelberht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of the new Eng land, became the centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the lan guage of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Prac tically his landing renewed the union with the western world which the landing of Hengest had all but destroyed. The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of na tions. The civilization, arts, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquest, returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that the codes 6i3] THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 23 of customary English law began to be put into writing soon after their arrival. As yet these great results were still distant; a year passed before ^thelberht yielded, and though after his conversion thousands of the Kentish men crowded to baptism, it was years before he ventured to urge the under-kings of Essex and East Anglia to receive the creed of their overlord. This effort of .(Ethelberht however only heralded a revolution which broke the power of Kent forever. The tribes of Mid-Britain revolted against his supremacy, and gathered under the overlordship of Raedwald of East Anglia. The revolution clearly marked the change which had passed over Britain. Instead of a chaos of isolated peoples, the conquerors were now in fact gathered into three great groups. The Engle kingdom of the north reached from the Humber to the Forth. The southern kingdom of the West-Saxons stretched from Watling Street to the Channel. And between these was roughly sketched out the great king dom of Mid-Britain, which, however its limits might vary, re tained a substantial identity from the time of ^thelberht till the final fall of the Mercian kings. For the next two hundred years the history of England lies in the struggle of Northum brian, Mercian, and West-Saxon kings to establish their su premacy over the general mass of Englishmen, and unite them in a single England. In this struggle the lead was at once taken by Northumbria, which was rising into a power that set all rivalry at defiance. Under .