3. THE ENGLISH CONQUEST.

[The Roman occupation of Britain came to an end officially in 410 A.D., and finally about 446. Thereafter the Britons were unable unaided to resist the attacks of the Picts and Scots, and they therefore asked the English, who were accustomed to visit their coasts, to give them help. The English willingly did so; and in the end they conquered and dispossessed the people whom they came to aid. The dates assigned to their settlements are from 449 to 603.]

1. The founders of the English people came straight across the sea from one small corner in the wilderness of nations,1 where three obscure tribes, unheeded at the time when the world was full of the name and terror of Goths and Huns, were loosely united in one of the leagues common at the time among the barbarians. Jutes, Angles, and a tribe of old "Saxons," whose fathers had moved over Europe from east to west, till they were stopped by the broad mouth of the Elbe, and by the bleak and dreary shores of the North Sea, had learned that the ocean, though very terrible, offered a useful warpath to the warriors who dared to trust it.

2. According to our earliest traditions, a band of these rovers, hovering about the coast as many other bands had for many years done before them, was invited, amid the anarchy left in Britain by the 'retirement of the Roman legions, to help Romanized Britons against their wilder kinsfolk.2 What followed was on a small scale the same as that which so often happened on a large one in the

empire. From allies the new comers became invaders, and the first invaders became masters of Kent. The English settlers in Kent were Jutes. Others from the same region followed.

3. A few years later, a band of Saxons in three ships, we are told, planted themselves on the coast of what they made Sussex. Another band in five ships, landing more to the westward, laid the foundation of the great kingdom of Wessex. On the east coast, Angles and Saxons continued to land, to invade, to occupy, from the Thames to the Wash, from the Wash to the Humber, from the Humber to the Tweed. Then, up the rivers and along the Roman (632)

2

roads, the different bands pushed forward into the interior, from the south coast, and from the east, with 'chequered fortune but with unabated stubbornness.

3

The native

4. They encountered equal stubbornness. resistance was of that kind which a weaker but tenacious race offers to a stronger one; unobservant of opportunities, slack and ineffective at critical moments, but obstinate, difficult to extinguish, always ready to revive, and sometimes bursting out into a series of heroic and victorious exploits. The name of King Arthur, whatever historical 'obscurity hangs about it, has left its indelible mark in our national traditions. Through continued ill fortune, with intervals of success, but with general failure, this resistance was 'protracted and fierce. But it was in vain. The advance of the tide was slow but continuous, sometimes arrested but never retreating; bit by bit the land was covered; fragment by fragment of British territory broke away, and was swallowed up in the rising flood, which came not in one channel but in many, and from many different sides.

5. The first attempts at occupation by the Jutes in Kent

were, according to the English chronicles, about the 449 middle of the fifth century, the years when southern A.D. and central Europe were trembling before the ter

rible king of the Huns. About fifty years later, in the times of Theodoric and Clovis, began the West Saxon advance under the house of Cerdic from the Hampshire harbours. In another half century, while Vandals and Goths were falling before the sword of Belisarius,7 there was an English kingdom set up in the north, and English settlements on the east coast, and along the rivers which run into the North Sea.

6. We see the British boundary driven inwards, and forming an irregular semicircle from the Clyde to the Land's End, flanked for a great portion of the line by the

A.D.

English settlements on the east, and broken into and deeply ⚫indented by the 'encroachments of English conquest along the course of the Severn. Another fifty 603 years, and the great English kingdom of Northumbria emerges under Æthelfrith, and the line of the British territories is again severed and broken up into separate districts.

7. Then began the second stage of the great change. The converging lines of advance met in the central part of the island. The struggle for new ground began between English tribes and kingdoms: wars for dominion were waged by one kingdom against its neighbours; 'supremacy, more or less wide and undisputed, was won by personal qualities in one king, was lost by the want of them in another, was exercised for a time, extinguished for a time, transferred from one kingdom to another, as each was the more fortunate in its men, its circumstances, and its wars. But this continual 'alternation of peace and war among the English kingdoms, this perpetual trial of strength, and this fluctuation between subordination and independence, was the process by which the tribes which had been a loose 'confederacy by the banks of the Eyder and the Elbe, were again to become one nation in England.

A.D.

8. The centre of power moved from the north, through the midland, to the south; from Northumbria to Mercia, from Mercia till it became permanently 827 fixed in Wessex.9 And by that time, three centuries and a half from the first Kentish inroads, by a progress most irregular and turbulent, but never interrupted, the English nation had grown into permanent form and character out of the detached bands and tribal settlements and petty kingdoms, among which the island was at first parcelled out. It had organized institutions, a language, a spirit of its own, which it owed to no foreign source. The new people which had arisen in the West, and changed

Cæsar's name of Britain to Egbert's England, was, as has been truly said, "the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome."

9. But, perhaps, because so slow and gradual, the English conquest was complete in a sense in which the Teutonic conquests on the mainland were not. It was the complete How this was done,

'displacement of one race by another. we have but imperfect accounts. But so much is certain, that whereas in the fifth century the language of Britain was Celtic, with an admixture of Latin in the towns where the Romanized population was gathered, in the course of two hundred years Celtic had disappeared, and Latin had been introduced afresh.

10. From the Tamar and the Severn to the Tweed, a new language, purely and unmixedly Teutonic, in structure, genius, and for the most part in its vocabulary, had become the speech of the country; the speech of all freemen; the speech of all but slaves, bondmen, and outlaws; the speech which gave names, if not to the rivers and the hills, or to the great walled cities remaining from the Roman times, yet to all the present divisions of the land, and to all the new settlements of men.

11. The English conquerors, unlike the Gothic and Frankish ones,10 had not suffered the old population to subsist around them. Saxons and Angles,-it is the only way in which the result is to be explained, carried their conquests to extermination. They slew, they reduced to slavery, or they drove off the former inhabitants; they cleared them away, as the Red Indians were cleared away in America. No trace of intermixture appears between the "Saxon" and the "Welsh," who hated one another with the deepest and most irreconcilable hatred. No British names appear among the servants of the English kings. No vestiges survived of British political or social life.