The same spot in Kent (the isle of Thanet), which had witnessed the
landing of Hengist and Horsa in 449, saw in 597 a band of men, calling
themselves "Strangers from Rome," arriving under the leadership of
Augustine.
They moved in solemn procession toward Canterbury, bearing before them
a silver cross, with a picture of Christ, chanting in concert, as they
went, the litany of their Church, Christianity had entered by the same
door through which paganism had come 150 years before.
The religion of Wodin and Thor had ceased to satisfy the expanding soul
of the Anglo-Saxon; and the new faith rapidly spread; its charm
consisting in the light it seemed to throw upon the darkness
encompassing man's past and future.
{26}
An aged chief said to Edwin, king of Northumbria, (after whom
"Edwins-borough" was named,) "Oh, King, as a bird flies through this
hall on a winter night, coming out of the darkness, and vanishing into
the darkness again, even so is our life! If these strangers can tell
us aught of what is beyond, let us hear them."
King Edwin was among the first to espouse the new religion, and in less
than one hundred years the entire land was Christianized.
With the adoption of Christianity a new life began to course in the
veins of the people.
Caedmon, an unlettered Northumbrian peasant, was inspired by an Angel
who came to him in his sleep and told him to "Sing." "He was not
disobedient unto the heavenly vision." He wrote epics upon all the
sacred themes, from the creation of the World to the Ascension of
Christ and the final judgment of man, and English literature was born.
"Paradise Lost," one thousand years later, was but the echo of this
poet-peasant, who was the Milton of the 7th Century.
{27}
In the 8th Century, Baeda (the venerable Beda), another Northumbrian,
who was monk, scholar, and writer, wrote the first History of his
people and his country, and discoursed upon astronomy, physics,
meteorology, medicine, and philosophy. These were but the early
lispings of Science; but they held the germs of the "British
Association" and of the "Royal Society;" for as English poetry has its
roots in Caedmon, so is English intellectual life rooted in Baeda.
The culmination of this new era was in Alfred, who came to the throne
of his grandfather, Egbert, in 871.
He brought the highest ideals of the duties of a King, a broad,
statesmanlike grasp of conditions, an unsullied heart, and a clear,
strong intelligence, with unusual inclination toward an intellectual
life.
Few Kings have better deserved the title of "great." With him began
the first conception of National law. He prepared a code for the
administration of justice in his Kingdom, which was prefaced by the Ten
Commandments, and ended with the Golden Rule; while in his leisure
hours he gave {28} coherence and form to the literature of the time.
Taking the writings of Caedmon, Baeda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius;
translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of
others upon a wide range of subjects.
He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of
her culture and literature besides. The people of Wantage, his native
town, did well, in 1849, to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of
the birth of the great King Alfred.
But a condition of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's
wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even
have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people
had widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings began to
be clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed," the
people were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this
class, in which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy
but natural fruits.
A slave or "unfree" class had come with {29} the Teutons from their
native land. This small element had for centuries now been swelled by
captives taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and
debt, which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the
collar of servitude. The slave was not under the lash; but he was a
mere chattel, having no more part than cattle (from whom this title is
derived) in the real life of the state.
In addition to this, political and social changes had been long
modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the
general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large
one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the
people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them
lower, until the old English freedom was lost.
The "folk-moot" and "Witenagemot"* were heard of no more. The life of
the early English State had been in its "folk-moot," and hence rested
upon the individual English freeman, who knew no superior but {30} God,
and the law. Now, he had sunk into the mere "villein," bound to follow
his lord to the field, to give him his personal service, and to look to
him alone for justice. With the decline of the freeman (or of popular
government) came Anglo-Saxon degeneracy, which made him an easy prey to
the Danes.
*Witenagemot--a Council composed of "Witan" or "Wise Men."
The Northmen were a perpetual menace and scourge to England and
Scotland. There never could be any feeling of permanent security while
that hostile flood was always ready to press in through an unguarded
spot on the coast. The sea wolves and robbers from Norway came
devouring, pillaging, and ravaging, and then away again to their own
homes or lairs. Their boast was that they "scorned to earn by sweat
what they might win by blood." But the Northmen from Denmark were of a
different sort. They were looking for permanent conquest, and had
dreams of Empire, and, in fact, had had more or less of a grasp upon
English soil for centuries before Alfred; and one of his greatest
achievements was driving these {31} hated invaders out of England. In
1013, under the leadership of Sweyn, they once more poured in upon the
land, and after a brief but fierce struggle a degenerate England was
gathered into the iron hand of the Dane.
Canute, the son of Sweyn, continued the successes of his father,
conquering in Scotland Duncan (slain later by Macbeth), and proceeded
to realize his dream of a great Scandinavian empire, which should
include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and England. He was one of those
monumental men who mark the periods in the pages of History, and yet
child enough to command the tides to cease, and when disobeyed, was so
humiliated, it is said, he never again placed a crown upon his head,
acknowledging the presence of a King greater than himself.
Conqueror though he was, the Dane was not exactly a foreigner in
England. The languages of the two nations were almost the same, and a
race affinity took away much of the bitterness of the subjugation,
while Canute ruled more as a wise native King than as a Conqueror.
{32}
But the span of life, even of a founder of Empire, is short. Canute's
sons were degenerate, cruel, and in forty years after the Conquest had
so exasperated the Anglo-Saxons that enough of the primitive spirit
returned, to throw off the foreign yoke, and the old Saxon line was
restored in Edward, known as "the Confessor."
Edward had qualities more fitted to adorn the cloister than the throne.
He was more of a Saint than King, and was glad to leave the affairs of
his realm in the hands of Earl Godwin. This man was the first great
English statesman who had been neither Priest nor King. Astute,
powerful, dexterous, he was virtual ruler of the Kingdom until the
death of the childless King Edward in 1066, when Godwin's son Harold
was called to the empty throne.
Foreign royal alliances have caused no end of trouble in the life of
Kingdoms. A marriage between a Saxon King and a Norman Princess, in
about the year 1000 A.D., has made a vast deal of history. This
Princess of Normandy, was the grandmother of the man, who was to be
known as "William {33} the Conqueror." In the absence of a direct heir
to the English throne, made vacant by Edward's death, this descent gave
a shadowy claim to the ambitious Duke across the Channel, which he was
not slow to use for his own purposes.
He asserted that Edward had promised that he should succeed him, and
that Harold, the son of Godwin, had assured him of his assistance in
securing his rights upon the death of Edward the Confessor. A
tremendous indignation stirred his righteous soul when he heard of the
crowning of Harold; not so much at the loss of the throne, as at the
treachery of his friend.
In the face of tremendous opposition and difficulties, he got together
his reluctant Barons and a motley host, actually cutting down the trees
with which to create a fleet, and then, depending upon pillage for
subsistence, rushed to face victory or ruin.
The Battle of Senlac (or Hastings) has been best told by a woman's hand
in the famous Bayeux Tapestry. An arrow pierced the unhappy Harold in
the eye, entering the brain, and the head which had worn the {34} crown
of England ten short months lay in the dust, William, with wrath
unappeased, refusing him burial.
William, Duke of Normandy, was King of England. Not alone that. He
claimed that he had been rightful King ever since the death of his
cousin Edward the Confessor; and that those who had supported Harold
were traitors, and their lands confiscated to the crown. As nearly all
had been loyal to Harold, the result was that most of the wealth of the
Nation was emptied into William's lap, not by right of conquest, but by
English law.
Feudalism had been gradually stifling old English freedom, and the King
saw himself confronted with a feudal baronage, nobles claiming
hereditary, military, and judicial power independent of the King, such
as degraded the Monarchy and riveted down the people in France for
centuries. With the genius of the born ruler and conqueror, William
discerned the danger and its remedy. Availing himself of the early
legal constitution of England, he placed justice in the old local
courts of the {35} "hundred" and "shire," to which every freeman had
access, and these courts he placed under the jurisdiction of the _King_
alone. In Germany and France the vassal owned supreme fealty to his
_lord_, against all foes, even the King himself. In England, the
tenant from this time swore direct fealty to none save his King.
With the unbounded wealth at his disposal, William granted enormous
estates to his followers upon condition of military service at his
call. In other words, he seized the entire landed property of the
State, and then used it to buy the allegiance of the people. By this
means the whole Nation was at his command as an army subject to his
will; and there was at the same time a breaking up of old feudal
tyrannies by a redistribution of the soil under a new form of land
tenure.
The City of London was rewarded for instant submission by a Charter,
signed,--not by his name--but his mark, for the Conqueror of England
(from whom Victoria is twenty-fifth remove in descent), could not write
his name.
{36}
He built the Tower of London, to hold the City in restraint. Fortress,
palace, prison, it stands to-day the grim progenitor of the Castles and
Strongholds which soon frowned from every height in England.
He took the outlawed, despised Jew under his protection; not as a
philanthropist, but seeing in him a being who was always accumulating
wealth, which could in any emergency be wrung from him by torture, if
milder measures failed. Their hoarded treasure flowed into the land.
They built the first stone houses, and domestic architecture was
created. Jewish gold built Castles and Cathedrals, and awoke the
slumbering sense of beauty. Through their connection with the Jews in
Spain and the East, knowledge of the physical sciences also streamed
into the land, and an intellectual life was created, which bore fruit a
century and a half later in Roger Bacon.
All these things were not done in a day. It was twenty years after the
Conquest that William ordered a survey and valuation of all the land,
which was recorded in what was known as "Domesday Book," that he {37}
might know the precise financial resources of his kingdom, and what was
due him on the confiscated estates. Then he summoned all the nobles
and large landholders to meet him at Salisbury Plain, and those
shapeless blocks at "Stonehenge" witnessed a strange scene when 60,000
men there took solemn oath to support William as King _even against
their own lords_. With this splendid consummation his work was
practically finished. He had, with supreme dexterity and wisdom,
blended two Civilizations, had at the right moment curbed the
destructive element in feudalism, and had secured to the Englishman
free access to the surface for all time. Thus the old English freedom
was in fact restored by the Norman Conquest, by _direct_ act of the
Conqueror.
William typified in his person a transitional time, the old Norse
world, mingling strangely in him with the new. He was the last outcome
of his race. Norse daring and cruelty were side by side with
gentleness and aspiration. No human pity tempered his vengeance. When
hides were hung on the City Walls at Alencon, in insult {38} to his
mother (the daughter of a tanner), he tore out the eyes, cut off the
hands and feet of the prisoners, and threw them over the walls. When
he did this, and when he refused Harold's body a grave, it was the
spirit of the sea-wolves within him. But it was the man of the coming
Civilization, who could not endure death by process of law in his
Kingdom, and who delighted to discourse with the gentle and pious
Anselm, upon the mysteries of life and death.
The _indirect_ benefits of the Conquest, came in enriching streams from
the older civilizations. As Rome had been heir to the accumulations of
experience in the ancient Nations, so England, through France became
the heir to Latin institutions, and was joined to the great continuous
stream of the World's highest development. Fresh intellectual stimulus
renovated the Church. Roman law was planted upon the simple Teuton
system of rights. Every department in State and in Society shared the
advance, while language became refined, flexible, and enriched.
This engrafting with the results of {39} antiquity, was an enormous
saving of time, in the development of a nation; but it did not change
the essential character of the Anglo-Saxon, nor of his speech. The
ravenous Teuton could devour and assimilate all these new elements and
remain essentially unchanged. The language of Bunyan and of the Bible
is Saxon; and it is the language of the Englishman to-day in childhood
and in extremity. A man who is thoroughly in earnest--who is
drowning--speaks Saxon. Character, as much as speech, remains
unaltered. There is small trace of the Norman in the House of Commons,
or in the meetings at Exeter Hall, or in the home, or life of the
people anywhere.
The qualities which have made England great were brought across the
North Sea in those "keels" in the 5th Century. The Anglo-Saxon put on
the new civilization and institutions brought him by the Conquest, as
he would an embroidered garment; but the man within the garment, though
modified by civilization, has never essentially changed.
{40}