The Norman invaders in the eleventh century found in the Isle of Britain, as any modern invader would find now, three nations, speaking three languages; and they found then, as would be found now, one of the three holding a distinct superiority over the whole land. Then as now, English, Welsh, and Gaelic were the three distinct tongues of the three races of the island; then as now, the dominant Teuton knew himself by no name but that of Englishman, and was known to his Celtic neighbour by no name but that of Saxon. The boundaries of the two races and of their languages were already fixed, nearly as they remain at present. The English tongue has made some advances since the eleventh century; but they are small compared with the advances which it had made between |Preservation of local names and divisions in England.| the fifth century and the eleventh. The main divisions of the country, the local names of the vast mass of its towns and villages, were fixed when the Norman came, and they have survived, with but little change, to our own day. While a map of France or Germany in the eleventh century is useless for modern purposes, and looks like the picture of another region, a map of England proper in the reign of Victoria hardly differs at all from a map of England proper in the reign of William. The Norman found in the land substantially the same English nation which still exists, occupying substantially the same territory which it occupies at present. He found it already exhibiting, in its laws, its language, its national character, the most essential |The Norman element absorbed in the English nation then and now existing.| of the features which it still retains. Into the English nation which he thus found already formed his own dynasty and his own followers were gradually absorbed. The conquered did not become Normans; but the conquerors did become Englishmen. It was by a very different process that the English themselves had made good their footing in the land in which the Norman found them, and to which they had long before given their name.
The details of the English Conquest of Britain, and the exact amount of historical truth to be found in them, are questions which hardly concern us here. It will be enough to point out the essential difference between the traditional narrative of the English Conquest, as contained in the English Chronicles,[1] and the romantic narrative of which Geoffrey of Monmouth is the chief |General credibility of the traditional narrative.| spokesman. The narrative in the Chronicles is perfectly credible in itself, and perfectly consistent with all the undoubted phænomena of later history. It is also perfectly consistent with the record of all those living witnesses whose testimony may be mistaken, but which themselves cannot lie. Such are the evidence of language and local nomenclature, the evidence of the surviving antiquities, the camps, the dykes, the barrows, which chronicle this warfare as well as the warfare of earlier and of later times. The only question is whether an accurate narrative of details can have been handed on from the date assigned to Hengest to the ascertained date of Bæda, whether by oral tradition, by runes, or by written documents which are lost to us. And this really amounts to little more than a question whether, in the earliest part of the narrative, the exact names and the exact dates can always be trusted. Some of the earlier names may be mythical;[2] some of the dates may have been reached by ingenious calculation rather than by genuine tradition. But granting all this, the main substance of the narrative remains essentially where it was.
Much learning and ingenuity has been spent, and, I venture to think, in many cases wasted, in attempts to show the untrustworthiness of the traditional account, by |Questions of earlier Teutonic invasions and settlements in Britain.| bringing forward proofs of Teutonic invasions, and even of Teutonic settlements, of an earlier date than that assigned by the Chronicles to the beginning of the English Conquest.[3] The facts which are brought forward are in most cases probable and in some cases certain, but I cannot look on them as having that bearing on later history which they have sometimes been supposed to have. It is possible that, among the tribes which Cæsar found in Britain, some, especially in the eastern districts of the island, may have been of Teutonic origin, or in some degree mingled with Teutonic elements. It is certain that in Britain, as everywhere else, Teutonic soldiers largely served in the Roman armies, and that settlements of such soldiers sometimes grew into permanent colonies.[4] It is certain that, long before the days of Cerdic or Hengest, Theodosius and Stilicho repelled Teutonic invasions; and it is probable that, by repelling such invasions, they hindered the formation of Teutonic settlements in Britain at that earlier |The course of the English Conquest not affected by them.| time.[5] But these facts or probabilities do not affect the credibility of the recorded course of the English Conquest, or of the tradition which fixes its real beginning in the middle of the fifth century. Teutonic settlements before the Roman invasion, or under the Roman domination, would be something quite different from the Teutonic invasions recorded from the fifth century onwards. Teutonic tribes subdued by the Roman arms, Teutonic soldiers planted as colonists by the Roman government, would sink into the general mass of Roman subjects; they would retain no strong national feeling; they would most likely not even retain their national language. The only way in which they could possibly influence the later history would be by making the establishment of the later Teutonic settlers a less difficult matter in those parts of the country which they occupied than in those where the population was purely Celtic or Roman.[6] We may admit the fact that the Teutonic, and even the distinctively Saxon, invasions began, not in the fifth century, but in |Light thrown on these events by the analogy of the Danish invasions.| the fourth. But the true bearing of this fact will be best understood by comparing the successive Saxon invasions with the later and better known invasions of the Danes both in England and in Gaul. In the Danish invasions I shall presently endeavour to establish three periods, one of mere plunder, one of settlement, one of political conquest. For the last of these three there was no opportunity under the circumstances of the earlier Teutonic invaders, but for the first two stages we may fairly look in the history of the English, as well as in that of the Danish, Conquest. The Saxon pirates against whom the Roman government found it needful to establish so elaborate a system of defence, find their parallels in those Danish plundering expeditions which ravaged various parts of England in the latter half of the eighth century and the former half of the ninth, and in the ravages inflicted on Gaul by chieftains earlier than Hasting. The Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlements of the fifth and sixth centuries answer to the |878.| settlements of Guthrum in East-Anglia in the ninth |912.| century and of Rolf in Neustria in the tenth. Even if it be held that the Saxons who were driven back by Theodosius and Stilicho designed settlement and not merely plunder, still, as they did not actually settle, the case remains much the same. The Teutons were baffled in their attempts at settlement in the fourth century; they succeeded in their attempts at settlement in the fifth. The general history of the Conquest, as handed down to us in the Chronicles, is therefore in no way affected by the certain fact of earlier incursions, by the possible fact of much earlier settlements. The really lasting effect of the Saxon invasions of the fourth century seems to have been this; the Saxon name became familiar to the Celtic inhabitants of Britain earlier than the Anglian name; consequently Saxon, and not Angle or English, has been the name by which the Teutonic immigrants in Britain have been known to their Celtic neighbours from that day to this.[7]
What then the English Chronicles profess to record is, not these early and transient incursions which led to no permanent result, but that series of constant, systematic, successful attempts at settlement on the part of various Teutonic tribes which constituted the English Conquest of |418.| Britain. Early in the fifth century the Roman legions were withdrawn from the island, and the former provincials were left to defend their new and precarious independence |No improbability in the story of Vortigern’s invitation, but the tale not essential.| how they might. The Southern Britons were now exposed to the attacks of the Picts and Scots who had never submitted to the Roman yoke, and there is no absurdity in the familiar story that a British prince took Teutonic mercenaries into his pay, and that these dangerous allies took advantage of the weakness of their hosts to establish themselves as permanent possessors of part of the island. But if this account be rejected, the general narrative of the Conquest is in no way affected; and, if it be accepted, we may be sure that Vortigern’s imitation of many Roman precedents did but hasten the progress of events. The attempts which had been checked while the Roman power was flourishing were sure to be renewed when the check was withdrawn, and if a Welsh King did invite a Jutish chieftain to defend him, that invitation was only the occasion, and not the cause, of the Conquest which now |449–597.| began. We cannot seriously doubt that, in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, a succession of tribes of kindred origin, all of them of the same Low-Dutch[8] stock, and speaking essentially the same Low-Dutch language, landed at various points of the British coast, that they gradually forced their way inland, and founded permanent |Extent of the English dominion and of the independent British states at the end of the sixth century.| Teutonic kingdoms. Before the end of the sixth century the Teutonic dominion stretched from the German Ocean to the Severn, and from the English Channel to the Firth of Forth. The northern part of the island was still held by Picts and Scots, Celtic tribes whose exact ethnical relation to each other hardly concerns us.[9] And the whole west side of the island, including not only modern Wales, but the great kingdom of Strathclyde, stretching from Dumbarton to Chester, and the great peninsula containing Cornwall, Devon, and part of Somerset, was still in the hands of independent Britons. The struggle had been long and hard, and the natives often kept their hold of a defensible district long after the surrounding country had been occupied by the invaders. It is therefore probable that, at the end of the sixth century and even later, there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence. It is probable also that, within the same frontier, there still were Roman towns, tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied by them.[10] But by the end of the sixth century even these exceptions must |The English Conquest, as a whole, accomplished by 597.| have been few. The work of the Conquest, as a whole, was accomplished. The Teutonic settlers had occupied by far the greater part of the territory which they ever were, in the strictest sense, to occupy. The complete supremacy of the island was yet to be won; but that was to be won, when it was won, by quite another process.
The English Conquest of Britain differed in several important respects from every other settlement of a Teutonic people within the limits of the Roman Empire. Everywhere else the invaders gradually adopted the language and the religion of the conquered. If the conquerors were heathens at the time of their settlement, they gradually adopted Christianity. If they had already adopted Christianity in its Arian form, they gradually exchanged their heretical creed for that of the Catholic |Gradual Romanization of the conquerors elsewhere in religion, language, &c.| Church. Everywhere but in Britain the invaders gradually learned to speak some form, however corrupt, of the language of Rome. The Teutonic conquerors of Italy, Spain, and Gaul have indeed infused into the Romance languages of these countries a large proportion of words of Teutonic origin. Still the language of all those countries remains essentially Latin; the Teutonic element in them is a mere infusion. Everywhere but in Britain the invaders respected the laws and the arts of Rome. The Roman Law was preserved, side by side with the Barbarian codes, as the rightful heritage of the conquered people; and, in the process of ages, the Roman Law gradually recovered its position as the dominant code of a large portion of continental Europe. Everywhere but in Britain the local divisions and local nomenclature survived the Conquest. Nearly every Gaulish tribe recorded by Cæsar has left its name still to be traced on the modern map.[11] In Britain everything is different. |Retention by the English of their Teutonic language and heathen worship.| The conquering English entered Britain as heathens, and, after their settlement in Britain, they still retained the heathen worship of their fathers. They were after a while converted to Christianity, but they were not converted by the Christians whom they found in the island, but by a special mission from the common ecclesiastical centre. Our bishoprics and ecclesiastical divisions are not, as they are in Gaul, an heritage of Roman times, representing Roman political divisions. Our oldest episcopal sees are foundations of later date than the English Conquest, and the limits of their dioceses answer, not to anything Welsh or Roman, but to the boundaries of ancient English |History of the English language—| principalities. And, as the English in Britain retained their religion, so they also retained their language, and they retained it far more permanently. A few Celtic, and a still fewer Latin,[12] words found their way into English from the first days of the Conquest, and a somewhat larger stock of Latin ecclesiastical terms[13] was |a Low-Dutch tongue with a Romance infusion.| naturally brought in by the Christian missionaries. But, with these two very small classes of exceptions, the English language retained its purely Low-Dutch character down to that great infusion of Romance words into our vocabulary which was a result, though not an immediate result, of the Norman Conquest. And to this day, though the Romance infusion divides the vocabulary of our dictionaries with our natural Teutonic speech, it still remains only an infusion, an infusion greater in degree, but essentially the same in kind, as the Teutonic infusion into the Romance languages.[14] As we cannot put together the shortest French sentence without the use of Romance words, so we cannot put together the shortest English sentence without the use of Teutonic words. But we can put together sentence after sentence of French without a single Teutonic word, and we can equally put together sentence after sentence of English without a single Romance word. In Britain too the arts of Rome perished as utterly as the language and the religion of Rome; arts, language, and religion were all brought back again at a later time and in a corrupted form. |Slight and late influence of the Roman Law in England.| The laws of Rome perished utterly; they exercised no influence upon our insular jurisprudence, until, in times after the Norman Conquest, the Civil Law was introduced as something utterly exotic. And even then our insular jurisprudence proved too strong for it; the Imperial legislation never gained in England the same supremacy which it gained in most parts of the Continent, and even in the Scottish portion of our island. The municipal institutions of the Roman towns in Britain utterly perished; no dream of ingenious men is more groundless than that which seeks to trace the franchises of English |Local nomenclature of England essentially Teutonic.| cities to a Roman source. In England again the local nomenclature is everywhere essentially Teutonic. A few great cities and a few great natural objects, London on the Thames and Gloucester on the Severn, still retain names older than the English Conquest; but the great mass of the towns and villages of England bear names which were given them either by the Angles and Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries or by the Danes of the |Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants.| ninth and tenth. In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility,[15] there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be often spared;[16] but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers. The nature of the small Celtic element |Nature of the Celtic element in English confirms this view.| in our language would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which has found its way into English expresses some small household matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with; nearly all the words belonging to the nobler callings, all the terms of government and war, and nearly all the terms of agriculture, are thoroughly Teutonic. In short, everywhere but in Britain an intruding nation sat down by the side of an elder nation, and gradually lost itself in its mass. In Britain, so far as such a process is possible, the intruding nation altogether supplanted the elder |Difference in the actual process of the Conquest in Britain and elsewhere.| nation. The process of the Conquest again, its gradual character, the way in which the land was won, bit by bit, by hard fighting, was of itself widely different from the Gothic settlements in Italy or Spain. This peculiar character of the English Conquest would of itself favour the complete displacement of the former inhabitants, by giving the remnant of the vanquished in any district the means of escape to those districts which were yet unconquered.
This remarkable contrast between the English Conquest of Britain and the other Teutonic settlements within the Empire seems to be due to two main causes. The position of Britain differed from that of Italy or Gaul or Spain, and the position of the Angles and Saxons differed from that of Goths, Burgundians, or even Franks. |Britain less thoroughly Romanized than Gaul and Spain.| The event alone might seem to show that the Roman occupation of Britain had not brought about so complete a Romanization of the country as had taken place in Gaul and Spain. The evidence of language looks the same way. In Spain and in Gaul the ante-Roman languages survive only in a few out of the way corners; the speech of the land is Roman. But in no part of Britain has any Roman language been spoken for ages; the speech of the land, wherever it is not English, is not Roman but Celtic. The surviving Britons kept, and still keep, their own native language and not the language of their Roman conquerors. It would therefore seem that the Roman occupation of Britain was, after all, very superficial, and that, when the legions were withdrawn, the natives largely fell back into their ancient barbarism. The English therefore found in Britain a more stubborn, because a more truly national, resistance than any that their Teutonic kinsmen found elsewhere. But on the other hand, they did not find that perfect and striking fabric of Roman laws, manners, and arts which elsewhere impressed the minds of the conquerors, |Familiarity of the other Teutons with Roman civilization.| and changed them from destroyers into disciples. Again, the Goths above all, and the Franks in some degree, had long been familiar with Rome in peace and in war. They had resisted Roman attempts at conquest and they had repaid them in kind. They had served in the Roman armies, and had received lands and honours and offices as the reward of their services. They were, in short, neither wholly ignorant of Roman civilization nor |The English utterly ignorant of it.| utterly hostile to it. But our forefathers came from lands where the Roman eagle had never been seen, or had been seen only during the momentary incursions of Drusus and Germanicus. They had never felt the charm which led Gothic kings to glory in the title of Roman generals, and which led them to respect and preserve the forms of Roman civilization and the monuments of Roman art. Our forefathers appeared in the Isle of Britain purely as destroyers; nowhere else in Western Europe were the existing men and the existing institutions so utterly swept away. The English wiped out everything Celtic and everything Roman as thoroughly as everything Roman was wiped out of Africa by the Saracen conquerors of Carthage. A more fearful blow never fell on any nation than the landing of the Angles |Results of the peculiar character of the English Conquest.| and Saxons was to the Celt of Britain. But we may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity of our forefathers. Had we stayed in our earlier land, we should have remained undistinguished from the mass of our Low-Dutch kinsfolk. Had we conquered and settled only as Goths and Burgundians conquered and settled, we should be simply one more member of the great family of the Romance nations. Had we been a colony sent forth after the mother country had attained to any degree of civilization, we might have been lost like the Normans in Sicily or the Franks in Palestine. As it was, we were a colony sent forth while our race was still in a state of healthy barbarism. We won a country for ourselves, and we grew up, a new people in a new land, bringing with us ideas and principles common to us with the rest of our race, but not bringing with us any of the theories and prejudices which have been the bane of later colonization. Severed from the old stock, and kept aloof from intermixture with any other, we ceased to be Germans and we did not become Britons or Romans. In our new country we developed a new system for ourselves, partly by purely native growth, partly by independent intercourse with the common centre of civilization. The Goth is merged in the Romance population of Italy, Spain, and Aquitaine; the Old-Saxon has lost his national being through the subtler proselytism of the High-German; but the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, transplanted to the shores of Britain, have won for themselves a new name and a new national being, and have handed on to us the distinct and glorious inheritance of Englishmen.
Thus, before the end of the sixth century, by far the greater and more fertile portion of Britain had become heathen and Teutonic. The land had been occupied by various tribes; and most probably, as always happens in such migrations, few bodies of settlers had been perfectly homogeneous. A certain following of allies or subjects of other races is almost sure to come in under the shadow of the main body. But it is clear that that main body was everywhere so distinctly and predominantly of Low-Dutch blood and speech as to swallow up any foreign elements which may have accompanied it during its migration, as well as any that it may have incorporated during the |The country occupied by various kindred tribes, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians.| process of the Conquest or after its completion. Three kindred tribes, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, are, in the common national tradition, said to have divided the land among them in very unequal proportions. For Saxons a contemporary foreign notice substitutes Frisians.[17] But Angles, Saxons, Frisians, were all tribes of one common stock; all spoke mere dialectic varieties of one common tongue. From the very beginning of the Conquest, all the Teutonic settlers, without distinction, are spoken of as belonging to “the English kin.”[18] To trace out, by the evidence of local nomenclature or otherwise, the exact extent of the settlements of these various kindred tribes is highly interesting and important as a matter of antiquarian and philological research. But the results of such inquiries are of little moment for the purpose of such a sketch as the present. |The various Teutonic tribes in Britain fused into one nation before the Norman Conquest.| Long before the Norman Conquest the various Low-Dutch tribes in Britain had been fused into one English nation. The distinction between Angle and Saxon had become a merely provincial distinction, and the jealousies which undoubtedly survived between them had become merely provincial jealousies. To the united nation the Angle had given his name, the Saxon had given his royal dynasty; the Jute, the least considerable in the extent of his territorial possessions, had been, according to all tradition, the first to lead the way to a permanent settlement, and he had undoubtedly been honoured by supplying the ecclesiastical centre from which Christianity was spread over the land. If Wessex boasted of the royal capital of Winchester, Kent boasted no less proudly of the spiritual metropolis of Canterbury.
The old notion of an Heptarchy, of a regular system of seven kingdoms, united under the regular supremacy of a single over-lord, is a dream which has passed away before the light of historic criticism. The English kingdoms in Britain were ever fluctuating, alike in their number and in their relations to one another. The number of perfectly independent states was sometimes greater and sometimes less than the mystical seven; and, till the beginning of the ninth century, the whole nation did not admit the regular |yet seven kingdoms more conspicuous than others.| supremacy of any fixed and permanent over-lord. Yet it is no less certain that, among the mass of smaller and more obscure principalities, seven kingdoms do stand out in a marked way, seven kingdoms of which it is possible to put together something like a continuous history, seven kingdoms which alone supplied candidates for the dominion of the whole island. First comes the earliest permanent |Kent. 449–825.| Teutonic settlement in Britain, the Jutish kingdom of Kent. The direct descendants of Hengest reigned over a land, which, as the corner of Britain nearest to the continent, has ever been the first to receive every foreign immigration, but which, notwithstanding, prides itself to this day on its specially Teutonic character and on the retention of various old Teutonic usages which have vanished elsewhere. Besides Kent, the Jutes formed no other strictly independent state. Their only other settlement |[The Jutes of Wight. 530–686.]| was a small principality, including the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire, whose history is closely connected with that of the great Saxon kingdom in its immediate |The three Saxon kingdoms.| neighbourhood, in which it was at last merged. The remainder of the English territory south of the Thames, together with some districts to the north of that river, formed the three kingdoms of the Saxons, the East, the South, and the West, whose names speak for themselves. Among these Sussex and Essex fill only a secondary part in |Sussex. 477–825.| our history. The greatness of Sussex did not last beyond the days of its founder Ælle, the first Bretwalda. Whatever |Essex. 526–825.| importance Essex, or its offshoot Middlesex, could claim as containing the great city of London was of no long duration. We soon find London fluctuating between the condition of an independent commonwealth and that of a dependency of the Mercian Kings. Very different was |Wessex. 519–869.| the destiny of the third Saxon kingdom. Wessex has grown into England, England into Great Britain, Great Britain into the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom into the British Empire. Every prince who has ruled England before and since the eleventh century[19] has had the blood of Cerdic the West-Saxon in his veins. At the |577–584.| close of the sixth century Wessex had risen to high importance among the English kingdoms, though the days of its permanent supremacy were still far distant. Step by step, from a small settlement on the Hampshire coast, the West-Saxons had won their way, fighting battle after battle against the Welsh, and, after nearly every battle, extending their borders by a new acquisition of territory. At the time of which I speak they held the modern shires of Hampshire, Berks, Wilts, Dorset, part of Somerset, with a considerable dominion north of the Thames and Avon, including the shires of Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, and Worcester, and an undefined territory stretching northwards along the valley of the Severn.[20] But this northern dominion was not lasting; the Thames and the Avon became the permanent boundaries of Wessex to the north, and the later extension of the West-Saxon dominion was wholly westward. At this time the Somerset Axe, and the forests on the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire, separated the kingdom from the independent |The three Anglian kingdoms.| Britons to the West. North of the Thames lay the three great kingdoms of the Angles. One of these, probably the most purely Teutonic realm in Britain,[21] occupied the great peninsula, or rather island,[22] between the fens and |East-Anglia. 571–870.| the German Ocean, which received from them the name of East-Anglia. Far to the north, from the Humber to the |Northumberland. 547–876.| Forth, lay the great realm of the Northumbrians, sometimes united under a single prince, sometimes divided by the Tyne or the Tees into the two kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. Both these kingdoms have a large sea-board, but they are not, like Wessex, distinctly attributed to a personal founder from beyond sea. The first recorded King of the Northumbrians is Ida, who began to reign in 547;[23] the first recorded King of the East-Angles is Offa, who began to reign in 571.[24] These dates give the beginnings of the kingdoms, but they do not give the beginnings of the English settlements in those countries. What Ida and Offa did was apparently to unite districts ruled by several independent, or at most confederated, Ealdormen into a |Mercia. 584?–877.| single kingdom. Meanwhile, in the middle of Britain, a power equal to any of the others was growing up, in which the same process is still more plainly to be discerned. The kingdom of the Mercians, the march or border land against the Welsh, appears at the end of the sixth century as a powerful state, but it has no distinctly recorded |Peculiar character of Mercia, as an union of small states of different origins.| founder, no distinctly recorded date of origin.[25] It seems to have grown up through the joining together of a great number of small principalities, probably of much more varied origin than the different portions of the other kingdoms. The prevailing blood was Anglian; but it is certain that the Mercian kingdom was considerably enlarged by conquest at the expense of the Saxon race. The West-Saxon conquests north of the Thames and Avon were gradually cut off from the West-Saxon body, and were constrained, along with all the other states of Mid-England, to admit the Mercian supremacy. Mercia, throughout its history, appears far more divided than any other part of England, the result, no doubt, of its peculiar |Minor principalities in the other kingdoms.| origin. But it must not be supposed that the other kingdoms formed compact or centralized monarchies. Wessex was an union of several kindred principalities, each having its own Ealdorman or Under-king, though all were united under one supreme chief. At one time five West-Saxon Kings appear in a single battle.[26] So in Kent there were Kings of East and West Kent, a fact which has left its memory in our ecclesiastical arrangements to the present day. No other English shire contains two bishoprics; the two sees of Canterbury and Rochester still bear witness to the former existence of two distinct kingdoms within the present shire. So, in East-Anglia, the two divisions of the race, the North and the South Folk, have left their almost unaltered names to two modern counties. But in these cases the principalities seem to have been formed by separate, though kindred, detachments of colonists, each of them ruled by a prince of the one royal house. In Wessex each successive conquest from the Welsh seems to have formed a new principality; but the national unity of the West-Saxon people was never lost, and it does not appear that any but princes of the line of Cerdic ever ruled within their borders. But in Mercia a crowd of wholly independent principalities seem to have been gradually united under one common rule—a type of the fate which the whole island was destined to undergo, though not at the hands of Mercia.
Such were the territorial divisions of Teutonic Britain at the end of the sixth century. Among a crowd of lesser states seven principal Kingdoms stand out conspicuously. And I do not hesitate to add that it was by no means unusual for the sovereign of one or other of these states |The supremacy of the Bretwaldas.| to win, whether by arms or by persuasion, a certain dominion over the rest, a dominion which presented the aspect of an acknowledged, though probably not a very well defined, supremacy. The famous title of Bretwalda[27] appears to have been borne by the princes in whom such a supremacy was successively vested. Eight kings, of five different kingdoms, including all the seven except Essex and Mercia, are said to have possessed this supremacy over the rest of their fellows. The list, it should be remarked, does not form a continuous series, and it ends, after a considerable gap, with the prince who established in one kingdom a lasting supremacy over all the rest. The earlier names probably represent earlier attempts at establishing a supremacy of the same kind, a supremacy which was more or less fully acknowledged at the time, but which the princes who held it failed to hand on to their successors. The early Bretwaldas and their dominion present us with the first foreshadowings of that union of the whole English race which was at last carried out by the West-Saxon Kings of the ninth and tenth centuries.
The last years of the sixth century were marked by a change hardly less important than the first settlement of the Teutonic tribes in Britain. The Christian faith, which the English had hitherto despised or passed by unheeded as the creed of the conquered Welsh, was now set before them by a special mission from the city which still commanded the reverence of all Western Europe. Kent, under its King Æthelberht, who then held the rank of Bretwalda, became the first Christian |597.| kingdom, and Canterbury became the first Christian city, the spiritual metropolis of the English nation. To the vanquished Welsh the conquering Saxons and Angles |Controversies between the Roman and Scottish parties.| had never listened; but no sooner had the Roman missionaries begun their work than another Christian element was brought in from the North, at the hands of the already converted Picts and Scots. Sectarian differences divided the two parties, and led to controversies which threatened to tear the infant Church in pieces. Christian Kings and kingdoms apostatized; heathen Kings overthrew the champions of the new faith |Christianity makes its way in England without violence.| in battle; but, amidst all these fluctuations, Christianity gradually but steadily made its way. And in no part of the world did Christianity make its way in a more honourable manner. We nowhere read of any of those persecutions, those conversions at the point of the sword, which disgraced the proselytizing zeal of the Frankish and Scandinavian apostles of the faith. Of the first Christian prince in England, it is distinctly told us that, while still a heathen, he hindered none of his subjects from embracing Christianity, and that, after he was himself converted, he constrained none to forsake their ancient faith.[28] In less than a century all the English kingdoms had fully accepted Christianity, and they had distinctly preferred its Roman to its Scottish form. |Conversion of Sussex, the last heathen part of Britain. 681| Before the end of the seventh century, the spiritual conquest of Britain was completed by the entrance of the South-Saxons into the fold of Christ; and, in the course of the eighth century, the insular Teutons showed themselves the most zealous of missionaries for the |English missionaries on the Continent.| conversion of those of their continental brethren who still remained in heathen darkness. Bishoprics were gradually founded, the limits of each diocese commonly answering to those of a kingdom or principality. The |597.| supremacy of Kent at the beginning of the conversion, |627.| the supremacy of Northumberland at the stage when Christianity was first preached to the northern English, is still shown to this day in the metropolitan position of Canterbury, the city of the Bretwalda Æthelberht, and of York, the city of the Bretwalda Eadwine. The land was speedily covered with churches and monasteries, the distinction between regulars and seculars being, during the missionary period, not very accurately drawn. Our forefathers soon acquired a fair share of the learning of the age, and the first two centuries after the conversion form a brilliant period in our ecclesiastical history, one which seems the more brilliant from the contrast with the time of renewed heathenism and darkness, which, in a large portion of Britain, was to follow it.
The conversion of the English to Christianity at once altered their whole position in the world. Hitherto our history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had had but little to do, either in war or in peace, with any nations beyond their own four seas. We hear little of any connexion being kept up between the Angles and Saxons who were settled in Britain, and their kinsfolk |Instances of connexion with the Franks in Gaul.| who abode in their older land.[29] The little intercourse that we read of with the mainland seems to be wholly with the Franks who now bore rule on the opposite coast of Gaul. Englishmen seem once, in the sixth century, to have found their way to the Imperial court, but it was in company with the ambassadors of a Frankish prince, who at least tried to represent himself as the over-lord of Britain.[30] One instance of connexion between Britain and Gaul may have had some indirect effect in promoting the work of conversion. English Kings then, and long after, commonly intermarried with English women, the daughters either of other English princes or of their own nobles. But the Bretwalda Æthelberht, before the landing of Augustine, was already married to a Frankish princess, who retained her Christian religion in his heathen court. Such a fact is chiefly remarkable for its strangeness; yet it points to a considerable amount of intercourse between Kent and the Franks of Paris at this particular moment. Still, up to the end of the sixth century, Britain, as a whole, was cut off from the rest of the world. It was a heathen and barbarous island, where the Christian faith was professed only by an obscure remnant, which, in some remote corners beyond the reach of the invaders, still retained a form of Christianity which, after all, was not the orthodoxy of the Old or of the New Rome. It was the conversion of our forefathers which brought England for the first time, not only within the pale of the Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political society of Europe. But our insular position, combined with the events of our earlier history, was not without its effect on the peculiar character of |England the first strictly national Church in the West.| Christianity as established in England. England was the first great territorial[31] conquest of the spiritual power, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, beyond the influence of Greek and Roman civilization. Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa, the Greek East and the remoter Churches of doubtful loyalty and orthodoxy, were all either actually under the sway of Cæsar, or retained distinct traces of the recent times when they had been so. When Æthelberht received baptism, the political sway of Rome still reached from the Ocean to the Euphrates, and the language of Rome was the one civilized speech from the Ocean to the Hadriatic. Strictly national Churches existed only in those lands of the further East, where the religious and the political loyalty of Syrians and Egyptians was already equally doubtful, and which were destined to fall away at the first touch of the victorious Saracen. In England, |Error of not employing the English language in public worship.| alone in the West, a purely national Church arose. One great error indeed was committed; the vernacular tongue did not become the language of public worship. The mistake was natural. It had occurred to no man to translate the Latin services, drawn up at a time when Latin was the universal language of the West, into those provincial dialects, the parents of the future Romance tongues, which were already growing up in Gaul and Spain. We should as soon think now of translating the Prayer-Book into the dialects of Somerset or Yorkshire. Led thus to look on Latin as the one tongue of worship, as well as of literature and government, Augustine and his successors failed to see that Teutonic England stood in a wholly different position from Romanized Gaul and Spain. They failed to see that the same reasons which required that men should pray in Latin at Rome required that they should pray in English at Canterbury. The error was pardonable, but in its effects it was great. Still, though England had not vernacular services, she soon began to form a vernacular literature, sacred and profane, poetical and historical, to which no other nation of the West can supply a parallel. The English Church, reverencing Rome, but not slavishly bowing down to her, grew up with a distinctly national character, and gradually infused its influence into all the feelings and habits of the English people. By the end of the seventh century, the independent, insular, Teutonic Church had become one of the brightest lights of the Christian firmament.
In short, the introduction of Christianity completely changed the position of the English nation both within its own island and towards the rest of the world. From this time the amount of intercourse with other nations steadily increased, and the change of religion had also a most |Practical effect of Christianity.| important effect within the island itself. The morality of the Gospel had a direct influence upon the politics of the age. The evangelical precepts of peace and love did not put an end to war, they did not put an end to aggressive conquest, but they distinctly humanized the way in which |The wars with the Welsh no longer wars of extermination.| war was carried on. From this time forth the never-ending wars with the Welsh cease to be wars of extermination. The heathen English had been satisfied with nothing short of the destruction or expulsion of their enemies; the Christian English thought it enough to |Advance of Wessex.| reduce them to political subjection. This is clearly marked in the advance of Wessex towards the West. Twenty |Conquests of Ceawlin. 577–584.| years before the coming of Augustine, Ceawlin, the West-Saxon Bretwalda, had won the great battle of Deorham; he had taken the cities of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester; he had then carried his arms northward, and in his northern march he had destroyed the Roman city of Uriconium. These northern conquests, as we have seen,[32] were in a certain sense temporary; the districts overrun by Ceawlin beyond the Avon, like the other West-Saxon possessions north of the Thames, ceased for ever to be Welsh, but they did not become for ever West-Saxon. But the land between the Avon and the Axe, the northern part of modern Somerset, became an abiding part of the West-Saxon realm. This was the last heathen conquest, the last exterminating conquest, waged by the West-Saxons against the Britons. During a space of three hundred years, the process of West-Saxon conquest |Further advances of the West-Saxons. 652–926.| still went on; step by step the English frontier advanced from the Axe to the Parret, from the Parret to the Tamar; Taunton at one stage, Exeter at another, were border fortresses against the Welsh enemy; step by step the old Cornish kingdom shrank up before the conquerors; till at last no portion of land south of the Bristol Channel was subject to a British sovereign. This was conquest; it was, no doubt, fearful and desolating conquest; but it was no longer conquest which offered only the dreadful alternatives of death, banishment, or personal slavery. The Christian Welsh could now sit down as subjects of the |In these later wars the Welsh are allowed to become West-Saxon subjects.| Christian Saxon. The Welshman was acknowledged as a man and a citizen; he was put under the protection of the law; he could hold landed property; his blood had its price, and his oath had its ascertained value.[33] The value set on his life and on his oath shows that he was not yet looked on as the equal of the conquering race; but the Welshman within the West-Saxon border was no longer a wild beast, an enemy, or a slave, but a fellow-Christian living under the King’s peace. There can be no doubt that the great peninsula stretching from the Axe to the Land’s End was, and still is, largely inhabited by men who are only naturalized Englishmen, descendants of the old Welsh inhabitants, who gradually lost their distinctive language and were merged in the general mass of their |Celtic element still remaining in the western shires of Wessex.| conquerors. In fact, the extinction of the Cornish language in modern Cornwall within comparatively recent times was only the last stage of a process which began with the conquests of Cenwealh in the seventh century. The Celtic element can be traced from the Axe, the last heathen frontier, to the extremity of Cornwall, of course increasing in amount as we reach the lands which were more recently conquered and therefore less perfectly Teutonized. Devonshire is less Celtic than Cornwall, and Somerset is less Celtic than Devonshire, but not one of those three shires can be called a pure Teutonic land like Kent or Norfolk. The same rule would doubtless apply to those less accurately recorded conquests by which the Mercian Kings extended their dominion from the Severn to the modern boundaries of Wales. We have now everywhere passed the age of extermination, and have entered on the age marked by the comparatively harmless process of political conquest.