The Project Gutenberg eBook of England
Title: England
Author: Frank Fox
Release date: February 7, 2012 [eBook #38790]
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
ENGLAND
BY
FRANK FOX
AUTHOR OF "RAMPARTS OF EMPIRE" "PEEPS AT THE BRITISH EMPIRE," "AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA"
WITH 32 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1914
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
To bring within the limits of one volume any detailed description of England—her history, people, landscapes, cities—would be impossible. I have sought in this book to give an impression of some of the most "English" features of the land, devoting a little space first to an attempt to explain the origins of the English people. Thus the English fields and flowers and trees, the English homes and schools are given far more attention than English cities, English manufactures; for they are more peculiar to the land and the people. More markedly than in any superiority of her material greatness England stands apart from the rest of the world as the land of green trees and meadows, the land of noble schools and of sweet homes:
Across this watery waste we fare,
One image at our hearts we bear,
Green fields of England, everywhere.
Past where the waves' last confines be,
Ere your loved smile I cease to see,
Sweet eyes in England, dear to me!
If but in thee my lot lie cast,
The past shall seem a nothing past
To thee, dear home, if won at last;
Dear Home in England, won at last.
That is the cry of an Englishman (Arthur Hugh Clough). On the same note—the green fields, the dear homes—a sympathetic visitor to England would shape his impressions on going away.
If, by chance, the reading of this book should whet the appetite for more about England, or some particular part of the kingdom, there are available in the same series very many volumes on different counties and different features of England. To these I would refer the lover or student of England wishing for closer details. My impression is necessarily a general one; and it is that of a visitor from one of the overseas Dominions—not the less interesting, I hope, certainly not the less sympathetic for that reason.
FRANK FOX.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Making of England—The Britons and the Romans 1
CHAPTER II
The Making of England—The Anglo-saxons and the Normans 16
CHAPTER III
The English Landscape and the English Love of it 28
CHAPTER IV
The Training of Young England 43
CHAPTER V
England at Work 64
CHAPTER VI
England at Play 81
CHAPTER VII
The Cities of England 101
CHAPTER VIII
The Rivers of England 114
CHAPTER IX
England's Shrines 125
CHAPTER X
The Poorer Population 137
CHAPTER XI
The Arts in England 155
CHAPTER XII
Political Life in England 171
CHAPTER XIII
The Defence of England 187
INDEX 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. St. Paul's from the River Thames Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
2. The Chalk Cliffs of England 1
3. North Side, Canterbury Cathedral 8
4. Richmond, Yorkshire 17
5. Norman Staircase, King's School, Canterbury 24
6. A Kent Manor-House and Garden 33
7. A Sussex Village 40
8. The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge 49
9. St. Magdalen Tower and College, Oxford 56
10. Broad Street, Oxford, looking West 59
11. Eton Upper School 62
12. Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, London 65
13. Harvesting in Herefordshire 72
14. Football at Rugby School 81
15. Cricket at "Lord's" 88
16. Trout-fishing on the Itchen, Hampshire 97
17. Dean's Yard, Westminster 104
18. Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, Hyde Park, London 107
19. Watergate Street, Chester 110
20. The River Rother, Sussex 115
21. Thames at Richmond, Surrey 118
22. Spring by the Thames 121
23. Windsor Castle from Fellows' Eyot: Early Spring 124
24. Glastonbury Abbey, Somersetshire 128
25. Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford-on-Avon 137
26. Gipsies on a Gloucestershire Common 144
27. The Tower from the Tower Bridge, looking West 153
28. Westminster Abbey from the end of the Embankment 160
29. Westminster and the Houses of Parliament 169
30. Hyde Park, London 176
31. Battleships Manœuvring 193
32. Changing the Guard 200
ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND—THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS
When Europe, as it shows on the map to-day, was in the making, some great force of Nature cut the British Islands off from the mainland. Perhaps it was the result of a convulsive spasm as Mother Earth took a new wrinkle on her face. Perhaps it was the steady biting of the Gulf Stream eating away at chalk cliffs and shingle beds. Whatever the cause, as far back as man knows the English Channel ran between the mainland of Europe and "a group of islands off the coast of France"; and the chalk cliffs of the greatest of these islands faced the newcomer to suggest to the Romans the name of Terra Alba: perhaps to prompt in some admirer of Horace among them a prophetic fancy that this white land was to make a "white mark" in the Calendar of History.
Considered geographically, the British Islands, taking the sum of the whole five thousand or so of them (counting islets), are of slight importance. Yet a map of the world showing the possessions of Great Britain—the area over which the people of these islands have spread their sway—shows a whole continent, large areas of three other continents, and numberless islands to be British. And when the astonishing disproportion between the British Islands and the British Empire has been grasped, it can be made the more astonishing by reducing the British Islands down to England as the actual centre from which all this greatness has radiated. It is true that the British Empire is the work of the British people: as the Roman Empire was of the Italian people and not of Rome alone. But it was in England that it had its foundation; and the English people made a start with the British Empire by subduing or coaxing to their domain the Welsh, the Scottish, and the Irish. Not to England all the glory: but certainly to England the first glory.
There is at this day a justified resentment shown by Scots and Irish, not to speak of Welshmen, when "England" is used as a term to embrace the whole of the British Isles. (Similarly Canadians resent the term "America" being arrogated by the United States.) A French wit has put very neatly the case for that resentment by stating that ordinarily an inhabitant of the British Isles is a British citizen until he does something disgraceful, when he is identified in the English newspapers as a "Scottish murderer" or an "Irish thief": but if he does something fine then he is "a gallant Englishman." That is neat satire, founded on a slight foundation of truth. Very often "England" is confounded with "Great Britain" when there is discussion of Imperial greatness. I do not want to come under suspicion of inexactness, which that confusion of terms shows. But writing of England, and England alone, it is just to claim at the outset that the actual first beginning of that great British power which has eclipsed all records of the world was in England: and it is worth the while to inquire into the causes which made for the growth of that power. It is necessary, indeed, to make that inquiry and get to know something of English history before attempting to look with an understanding eye upon English landscapes, English cities, and the English people of to-day. The classic painters of the greatest age of Art used landscape only as the background for portraiture. The human interest to them was always paramount. And, whether one may or may not go the whole way with these painters in the appraisement of the relative value of the human or the natural, clear it is that a human interest heightens the value of every scene; and there can be no full appreciation of a country without a knowledge of its history.
"When a noble act is done—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty: when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and the moon come each and look upon them once in the steep defile of Thermopylæ: when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" Assuredly "yes" to that question from Emerson, and assuredly, too, they pay back every day what they have borrowed, giving to a noble landscape the added charm of its human association with a noble deed. The white cliffs of England are beautiful and impressive as they show like gleaming ramparts defending green fields and fruitful valleys. But they become more beautiful and more impressive as one thinks of them confronting the Romans stepping from Gaul to a wider conquest; or facing William of Normandy as he set out to enforce a weak claim with a strong sword; or set like white defiant teeth at the great ships of the Spanish Armada as they passed up the English Channel with Drake in pursuit, the unwieldy Spanish galleons showing like bulls pursued by gadflies.
Let us then look for a moment at England in the making before considering the England of to-day.
When the British Isles were cut off from the mainland, England was, without doubt, inhabited by people akin to the Gauls. The people of the French province of Brittany are to-day very clearly cousins of the people of those districts of England, such as Cornwall, which preserve most of the old Briton blood. Separation from the mainland does not seem to have effected very much change in the national type by the time that history came on the scene to make her records. Cæsar found the Britons very like the Gauls. They had not developed into a maritime people. Fisheries they had, for food and for pearls; but they had none of the piratical adventurousness of the Norsemen. That they were naked, woad-painted savages, those Britons of Cæsar's time, has been held long as a popular belief. But that is hardly tenable in the light of the knowledge which recent archæological investigation has given, though, likely enough, they painted for battle, as soldiers of a later time used to wear plumes and glittering uniforms to impress and frighten the enemy.
Excavations in more than one district of late have shown that the early Britons possessed a good share of civilisation before ever the Romans came to their land. Thus near Northampton there is a place which used to be a camp of the Britons prior to the Roman occupation. The camp has an area of about four acres, and was defended by a ditch fifteen feet deep, and about thirty feet wide, with a rampart on either side of the fosse.
Here were discovered the bases of what are considered to have been the remains of the hut-dwellings of the occupiers of the camp. Of these some three hundred were found filled with black earth and mould, and from them many most interesting articles were obtained. There were many iron relics, such as swords, daggers, spear heads, knives, saws, sickles, adzes, an axe, plough-shares, nails, chisels, gouges, bridles (one with a bronze centre-bit), and a well-formed pot-hook made of twisted iron. In bronze there were remains of two sword scabbards, four brooches, some fragments belonging to horse harness, pins and rings, and a small spoon. There were also glass beads and rings, a fragment of jet, a number of spindle whorls for spinning, bone combs used in weaving, and about twenty triangular-shaped bricks pierced through each corner, considered to be loom weights to keep the warp taut; more than a hundred querns or millstones, some of the corn which was ground in them (this fortunately happened to be charred and so preserved), and remains of about four hundred pots, nearly all used for domestic purposes. One of the bronze scabbards bears on the top an engraved pattern of the decorative art of the period, showing the Triskele, a sun symbol often found on remains of the Bronze Age in Denmark as well as elsewhere.
Similar pre-Roman relics have been obtained from the Marsh Village near Glastonbury, from Mount Coburn near Lewes, and from near Canterbury. The unmistakable evidence of these relics is that the pre-Roman Briton could spin and weave, knew how to plough and when to sow, was an excellent carpenter, and was an expert in metal work, both in iron and bronze, and possessed a decorative art. He was therefore not a "savage" as savages were understood in those days.
We must consider the Britons, then, of Cæsar's time as possessed of some degree of civilisation. They understood fabrics, pottery, metals, architecture. They had come into contact with the civilisation of the Mediterranean Sea long before his day. The Scilly Islands off the coast of Cornwall can reasonably be identified as the Casserterrides of the Phœnicians, where the merchants of Tyre and Sidon bought tin, giving cloth in exchange. It is said, indeed, that an ingot of tin with a Phœnician mark upon it was dredged up once from Falmouth Harbour. Probably the very earliest mention of Britain is by Hecatæus (b.c. 500, about the time when Marathon was fought). He described Britain then as an isle of the Hyperboreans, and alleged that the inhabitants "raised two crops in the year and worshipped the sun."
That may be the first original sneer at the British climate, the sneer which now takes the form that whenever the sun appears in England it is photographed, lest the inhabitants of the island should forget what it is like. (There is an Australian "drought" story of the same order of humorous exaggeration, that in a certain district the rain from heaven had been withheld so long, and grass had so long disappeared, that when at last relief came and the grass grew the sheep would not eat it, as they did not recognise what it was!) But perhaps Hecatæus was serious. It is not at all unlikely that the gossip Hecatæus had of the Isle of the Hyperboreans came from Phœnician sources, and referred to that south-westerly extremity of Cornwall which gets the full benefit of the warm Gulf Stream, and has in consequence an astonishingly mild climate for its latitude, a climate quite capable of producing sometimes two crops a year.
As for sun worship, there are many indications of the practice of its rites in prehistoric Britain. The "Round Towers" which are sprinkled over Ireland can best be explained by a theory of sun worship. Stonehenge, in the south of England, which dates back to about 1500 years b.c., was probably a temple of sun worship. There are the ruins of a temple, possibly of the sun, at Avebury (Wilts.) of even older date.
It would be impossible to attempt even to hint at all the evidence in the matter. But what may be accepted quite safely as a fact is, that in prehistoric times the Briton was no laggard in the path of civilisation: that indeed he was among the early pilgrims on that path. Even as far north as the Yorkshire Wolds—it is clear from recent excavations—there was a thick local population of men in the Neolithic Age. The burial mounds of these Neolithic tribes have lately been excavated, and have given much valuable evidence as to the history of Man. The "Ipswich Man," too—the indubitable remains of a man who walked upright and who had skull accommodation for a human brain, discovered in strata of a most remote age of the earth—proves that in the little corner of the world which was to have such a wonderful history in the far future, there were early indications of promise.
It is worth while to clear our British ancestors of the reproach of being woad-painted savages at a time of the world's history when every European, almost, had learned at least the use of skins. For those Britons were responsible for that "Celtic fringe" which to-day shows so largely in our poetry and our politics, and in other walks of life. The ancient Briton enters into the making of modern England through the strong traces of his ancestry left in Cornwall, Devon, the Marches of Wales, and elsewhere.
But respectably clothed, arm-bearing, house-building personage as he was, the ancient Briton would never have made a very great mark in the world if he had been left to himself. He would never have overflowed to send out tidal waves of conquest like the Norsemen or the Goths. Possibly even in those early days he had his Celtic qualities of poetry and imagination and argumentativeness, and spent much of his energy in dreaming things instead of doing things. It was when the Romans came that England began to shape towards a big place in the world.
The Romans do not seem to have had a very bloody campaign in subduing that part of Britain which is now England. The people were rather softer than the Gauls of the mainland. Their country was penetrated by several rivers such as the Thames, which gave easy highways to the Roman galleys. The gentle contours of the country made easy the building of the Roman roads, which were the chief agents of Roman civilisation. But the Roman dominion in the British Islands stopped with England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland remained unsubdued. That fact was to have an important bearing on the future of England. Step by step, Fate was working for the making of the people who were to cover the whole earth with their dominions.
We have seen that in the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate singularly mild and promotive of fertility. When the separation from the mainland came because of the cutting of the English Channel, the Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their soft environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.
With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards, though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)
But side by side with the growth of a gracious civilisation in England, there was constant warfare on the borders. The wilder natives of the British islands refused the Roman sway, and threatened by their forays the security of the new cities. This made necessary a great military organisation, which has left its mark on the England of to-day in the Roman roads and the sites of Roman military camps dotted all over the country from the Thames to the Tweed. The remains of these camps are quite distinguishable in many places; and generally they are known as "Cæsar's camps," whether Julius Cæsar ever saw their neighbourhood or not. Probably Carausius was the "Cæsar" of many of these camps.
Despite the border wars the Romanised Britons got on fairly comfortably until the failing power of the Roman Empire made it necessary for the Roman legions to withdraw to Italy. This left Romanised Britain to be attacked by the wilder Britons of the north and the west. That these attacks should have been as successful as they were, hints that the south Briton of England was rather a soft fellow. Since, as we will find later, the Anglo-Saxon—once comfortably settled in England—showed a tendency also to become a soft fellow, and had to be pricked to greatness by the Dane and the Norman, it would almost seem that this gentle, green, cloudy England has ultimately a softening effect on its inhabitants. But fresh blood pours in to bring vigour. England invites adventurers by her beauty and then tames them. Because of her perpetual invitation the British nation has been made of a brew of Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman bloods, and all these people have left their mark on the landscape of the country.
CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND—THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS
How the Romanised Briton of England would have fared ultimately in his contest with the more savage Britons of the north and the west, who came to rob him down to his toga, if they had been left to fight it out, it is hard to say. Probably the course of events would have been that the English natives would first have yielded to the northern invaders, and afterwards absorbed them and made them partakers in their civilisation.
But the issue was never fought out. There had begun the most momentous swarming of a human race that history records. Along the Scandinavian and the Danish peninsulas, and the northern coast of Germany, there had been swelling up a vast population of fierce, strong, courageous and hungry men; Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen—they were all very much akin: big blue-eyed men of mighty daring mated with fair, chaste, fruitful women; and they swarmed out of their warrens to over-run the greater part of Europe. You may trace them to the interior of Russia, to Iceland, to Constantinople, some think to North America. But, whatever their path, the British Islands were athwart the track they took, and the British Islands received the most complete flood of Anglo-Saxon blood. Again it was England that made way most easily to the invader. The Anglo-Saxons came and cleared out the Romanised and Christian civilisation from Yorkshire to Kent. But the fiercer British natives who had held back the Romans, held back also these new invaders, helped thereto by the fact that their lands seemed to be hungry, and to offer but little booty. England, fat, fertile, like a beautiful park with its forests and meadows and rivers, was at once a richer and an easier prize.
The Anglo-Saxon probably made his conquest more easy by treachery and by fomenting discord among the Britons. There is a ballad by Thomas Love Peacock, which treats of such an Anglo-Saxon victory—with at least a shadow of a shade of historical warrant:—
Spake the dark dweller of the sea.
"There shall the hours in mirth proceed;
There neither sword nor shield shall be."
The flower of Britain's chiefs were there;
Unarmed, amid the Saxon band
They sate, the fatal feast to share.
Went, where the festal torches burned
Before the dweller of the sea;
They went, and three alone returned.
The ocean chief unclosed his vest,
His hand was on his dagger's haft,
And daggers glared at every breast.
Still it was an easy victory, that of Anglo-Saxon over Briton. But just as we must, in the light of recent knowledge, give up the idea that the Briton whom Julius Cæsar encountered was a woad-painted savage, so we must refuse to accept the impression (which is implied more often than directly stated) that the Romanised Briton, after the departure of the Roman legions, was quite helpless. Between the Roman departure from Britain and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms there, room must be found, somehow, for whatever of historical truth there is as a foundation for the Arthurian legends. On that point let old Caxton speak:—
Now it is notoriously known through the universal world that there be nine worthy and the best that ever were. That is to wit three paynims, three Jews, and three Christian men. As for the paynims they were tofore the Incarnation of Christ, which were named, the first Hector of Troy, of whom the history is come both in ballad and in prose; the second Alexander the Great; and the third Julius Cæsar, Emperor of Rome, of whom the histories be well-known and had.
And as for the three Jews which also were tofore the Incarnation of our Lord, of whom the first was Duke Joshua which brought the children of Israel into the land of behest; the second David, King of Jerusalem; and the third Judas Maccabæus; of these three the Bible rehearseth all their noble histories and acts.
And sith the said Incarnation have been three noble Christian men stalled and admitted through the universal world into the number of the nine best and worthy, of whom was first the noble Arthur, whose noble acts I purpose to write in this present book here following. The second was Charlemagne or Charles the Great, of whom the history is had in many places both in French and English; and the third and last was Godfrey of Bouillon, of whose acts and life I made a book unto the excellent prince and king of noble memory, King Edward the Fourth. The said noble gentleman instantly required me to imprint the history of the said noble king and conqueror, King Arthur, and of his knights, with the history of the Sangreal, and of the death and ending of the said Arthur; affirming that I ought rather to imprint his acts and noble feats, than of Godfrey of Bouillon, or any of the other eight, considering that he was a man born within this realm, and king and emperor of the same; and that there be in French divers and many noble volumes of his acts, and also of his knights.
To whom I answered, that divers men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables, by cause that some chronicles make of him no mention nor remember him no thing, nor of his knights. Whereunto they answered, and one in special said, that in him that should say or think that there was never such a king called Arthur, might well be credited great folly and blindness; for he said that there were many evidences of the contrary: first ye may see his sepulture in the Monastery of Glastonbury. And also in Polichronicon, in the fifth book of the sixth chapter, and in the seventh book and the twenty-third chapter, where his body was buried and after found and translated into the said monastery. Ye shall see also in the history of Bochas, in his book De Casu Principum, part of his noble acts, and also of his fall.
Also Galfridus in his British book recounteth his life; and in divers places of England many remembrances be yet of him and shall remain perpetually, and also of his knights. First in the Abbey of Westminster, at Saint Edward's shrine, remaineth the print of his seal in red wax closed in beryl, in which is written Patricius Arthurus, Britannæ, Gallie, Germanie, Dacie, Imperator. Item in the castle of Dover ye may see Gawaine's skull and Craddock's mantle, at Winchester the Round Table, in other places Launcelot's sword and many other things. Then all these things considered, there can no man reasonably gainsay but there was a king of this land named Arthur. For in all places, Christian and heathen, he is reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the first of the three Christian men. And also he is more spoken of beyond the sea, more books made of his noble acts than there be in England, as well in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, as in French. And yet of record remain in witness of him in Wales, in the town of Camelot, the great stones and marvellous works of iron, lying under the ground, and royal vaults, which divers now living hath seen.
I fear one cannot take Caxton's endorsement of Sir Thomas Malory as final evidence, and accept as historic a King Arthur who on one occasion invaded the European Continent and defeated in battle the troops of the Roman Emperor. But there were men to fight in England after the Romans left; and those beaten in the fight fell back on Scotland, on Wales, on Cornwall, and some of them wandered farther afield and colonised Brittany in France, a province which to-day reminds of Cornwall at a thousand points.
The Anglo-Saxons, like other nations, found the air of England civilising. They aspired to settle down in quiet comfort when there came from the east a fresh cloud of freebooters, the Danes, to claim a share in this delectable island. Dane and Saxon fought it out—the Briton from "the Celtic fringe" occasionally interfering—with all the hearty ill-will of blood relations, and as they fought shaped out a very good people, partly English, partly Saxon, partly Danish, and in the mountains partly British.
If you look over England with a seeing eye, you can notice the traces of each element in the nation's blood; and the landscape will partly explain why in one place there is a Celtic predominance, in another a Danish. Each national type sought and held the districts most suitable to its character.
After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the British race was the Norman. The Normans were not so much aliens as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while merged amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the present British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman—a hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous type, which in its making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take.
The Normans brought to England a higher knowledge of the arts than the Anglo-Saxons had. The Roman culture of Britain had been just as high as the Roman culture of Gaul. But in Britain its tradition had been lost to a great extent in the onrush of the rude, unlettered Anglo-Saxons. In Gaul the Norsemen had won only a district, not the whole country, and they had been surrounded by civilising influences and had reacted to them wonderfully. Practically all the fine buildings of England date from after the Norman Epoch. But it is a fact which will strike at once the student of those buildings, who afterwards compares them with contemporary Norman buildings in France, that Norman architecture was not transplanted to England. Whilst at Rouen, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, you see the churches usually in Flamboyant or Ogival Gothic; in England the churches of about the same date are in a more severe and straight-laced style. It is well worth the trouble to study somewhat closely the churches built by the Normans in France and by the Norman-English in England during the century after the Conquest. A clear indication will be found from the study that the Normans did not over-run and beat down the Anglo-Saxons; but that the Anglo-Saxon was the "predominant partner" almost from the first in the domestic economy of the nation, however badly he fared in the tented field against the Normans.
The antiquities of England, the edifices of England, the very fields of England will be understood better if they are looked at in the light of English history—not that bare-bones caricature of history which is a mere record of battles and kings, but the living history which traces to their sources the streams of our race. The England of to-day is beginning to know the wisdom of a close sympathetic study of the past. One of the signs of this awakening of the historical sense is the popularity of the open-air pageant reviving scenes of old. I shall always remember, among many of those pageants, a particularly fine one at Chester, a city of great historic importance.