See FRANCE: A. D. 1789-1791;
1791 (JULY-SEPTEMBER); and 1791-1792.
EMITES, The.
See JEWS: EARLY HEBREW HISTORY.
EMMAUS, Battle of.
Defeat of a Syrian army under Gorgias by Judas Maccabæus,
B. C. 166.
Josephus, Antiquity of the Jews, book 12, chapter 7.
EMMENDINGEN, Battle of.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1796 (APRIL-OCTOBER). .
EMMET INSURRECTION, The.
See IRELAND: A. D. 1801-1803.
EMPEROR.
A title derived from the Roman title Imperator.
See IMPERATOR.
EMPORIA, The.
See CARTHAGE, THE DOMINION OF.
ENCOMIENDAS.
See SLAVERY, MODERN: OF THE INDIANS;
also, REPARTIMIENTOS.
ENCUMBERED ESTATES ACT, The.
See IRELAND: A. D. 1843-1848.
ENCYCLICAL AND SYLLABUS OF 1864, The.
See PAPACY: A. D. 1864.
ENCYCLOPÆDISTS, The.
"French literature had never been so brilliant as in the
second half of the 18th century. Buffon, Diderot, D'Alembert,
Rousseau, Duclos, Condillac, Helvetius, Holbach, Raynal,
Condorcet, Mably, and many others adorned it, and the
'Encyclopædia,' which was begun in 1751 under the direction of
Diderot, became the focus of an intellectual influence which
has rarely been equalled. The name and idea were taken from a
work published by Ephraim Chambers in Dublin, in 1728. A noble
preliminary discourse was written by D'Alembert; and all the
best pens in France were enlisted in the enterprise, which was
constantly encouraged and largely assisted by Voltaire. Twice
it was suppressed by authority, but the interdict was again
raised. Popular favour now ran with an irresistible force in
favour of the philosophers, and the work was brought to its
conclusion in 1771."
W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the 18th Century,
chapter. 20 (volume 5).
ALSO IN:
_J. Morley,
Diderot and the Encyclopædists,
chapter 5 (volume 1)._
_E. J. Lowell,
The Eve of the French Revolution,
chapter 16._
ENDICOTT, John, and the Colony of Massachusetts Bay.
See MASSACHUSETTS: A. D. 1623-1629, and after.
ENDIDJAN, Battle of (1876).
See RUSSIA: A. D. 1859-1876.
ENGADINE, The.
See SWITZERLAND: A. D. 1396-1499.
ENGEN, Battle of (1800).
See FRANCE: A. D. 1800-1801 (MAY-FEBRUARY).
ENGERN, Duchy of.
See SAXONY: THE OLD DUCHY.
ENGHIEN, Duc d',
The abduction and execution of.
See FRANCE: 1804-1805.
ENGLAND:
Before the coming of the English.
The Celtic and Roman periods.
See BRITAIN.
ENGLAND: A. D.449-547.
The three tribes of the English conquest.
The naming of the country.
"It was by ... three tribes [from Northwestern Germany], the
Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes, that southern Britain was
conquered and colonized in the fifth and sixth centuries,
according to the most ancient testimony. ... Of the three, the
Angli almost if not altogether pass away into the migration:
the Jutes and the Saxons, although migrating in great numbers,
had yet a great part to play in their own homes and in other
regions besides Britain; the former at a later period in the
train and under the name of the Danes; the latter in German
history from the eighth century to the present day."
_W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
volume 1, chapter 3._
"Among the Teutonic settlers in Britain some tribes stand out
conspicuously; Angles, Saxons, and Jutes stand out
conspicuously above all. The Jutes led the way; from the
Angles the land and the united nation took their name; the
Saxons gave us the name by which our Celtic neighbours have
ever known us. But there is no reason to confine the area from
which our forefathers came to the space which we should mark
on the map as the land of the continental Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes. So great a migration is always likely to be swollen by
some who are quite alien to the leading tribe; it is always
certain to be swollen by many who are of stocks akin to the
leading tribe, but who do not actually belong to it.
{780}
As we in Britain are those who stayed behind at the time of
the second great migration of our people [to America], so I
venture to look on all our Low-Dutch kinsfolk on the continent
of Europe as those who stayed behind at the time of the first
great migration of our people. Our special hearth and cradle
is doubtless to be found in the immediate marchland of Germany
and Denmark, but the great common home of our people is to be
looked on as stretching along the whole of that long coast
where various dialects of the Low-Dutch tongue are spoken. If
Angles and Saxons came, we know that Frisians came also, and
with Frisians as an element among us, it is hardly too bold to
claim the whole Netherlands as in the widest sense Old
England, as the land of one part of the kinsfolk who stayed
behind. Through that whole region, from the special Anglian
corner far into what is now northern France, the true tongue
of the people, sometimes overshadowed by other tongues, is
some dialect or other of that branch of the great Teutonic
family which is essentially the same as our own speech. From
Flanders to Sleswick the natural tongue is one which differs
from English only as the historical events of fourteen hundred
years of separation have inevitably made the two tongues--two
dialects, I should rather say, of the same tongue--to differ.
From these lands we came as a people. That was our first
historical migration. Our remote forefathers must have made
endless earlier migrations as parts of the great Aryan body,
as parts of the smaller Teutonic body. But our voyage from the
Low-Dutch mainland to the isle of Britain was our first
migration as a people. ... Among the Teutonic tribes which
settled in Britain, two, the Angles and the Saxons, stood out
foremost. These two between them occupied by far the greater
part of the land that was occupied at all. Each of these two
gave its name to the united nation, but each gave it on
different lips. The Saxons were the earlier invaders; they had
more to do with the Celtic remnant which abode in the land. On
the lips then of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain, the whole
of the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain were known from the
beginning, and are known still, as Saxons. But, as the various
Teutonic settlements drew together, as they began to have
common national feelings and to feel the need of a common
national name, the name which they chose was not the same as
that by which their Celtic neighbours called them. They did
not call themselves Saxons and their land Saxony; they called
themselves English and their land England. I used the word
Saxony in all seriousness; it is a real name for the Teutonic
part of Britain, and it is an older name than the name
England. But it is a name used only from the outside by Celtic
neighbours and enemies; it was not used from the inside by the
Teutonic people themselves. In their mouths, as soon as they
took to themselves a common name, that name was English; as
soon as they gave their land a common name, that name was
England. ... And this is the more remarkable, because the age
when English was fully established as the name of the people,
and England as the name of the land, was an age of Saxon
supremacy, an age when a Saxon state held the headship of
England and of Britain, when Saxon kings grew step by step to
be kings of the English and lords of the whole British island.
In common use then, the men of the tenth and eleventh
centuries knew themselves by no name but English."
_E. A. Freeman,
The English People in its Three Homes
(Lectures to American Audiences,
pages 30-31, and 45-47)._
See ANGLES AND JUTES, and SAXONS.
ENGLAND: A. D. 449-473.
The Beginning of English history.
The conquest of Kent by the Jutes.
"In the year 449 or 450 a band of warriors was drawn to the
shores of Britain by the usual pledges of land and pay. The
warriors were Jutes, men of a tribe which has left its name to
Jutland, at the extremity of the peninsula that projects from
the shores of North-Germany, but who were probably akin to the
race that was fringing the opposite coast of Scandinavia and
settling in the Danish Isles. In three 'keels'--so ran the
legend of their conquest--and with their Ealdormen, Hengest
and Horsa, at their head, these Jutes landed at Ebbsfleet in
the Isle of Thanet. With the landing of Hengest and his
war-band English history begins. ... In the first years that
followed after their landing, Jute and Briton fought side by
side; and the Picts are said to have been scattered to the
winds in a great battle on the eastern coast of Britain. But
danger from the Pict was hardly over when danger came from the
Jutes themselves. Their numbers probably grew fast as the news
of their settlement in Thanet spread among their fellow
pirates who were haunting the channel; and with the increase
of their number must have grown the difficulty of supplying
them with rations and pay. The dispute which rose over these
questions was at last closed by Hengest's men with a threat of
war." The threat was soon executed; the forces of the Jutes
were successfully transferred from their island camp to the
main shore, and the town of Durovernum (occupying the site of
modern Canterbury) was the first to experience their rage.
"The town was left in blackened and solitary ruin as the
invaders pushed along the road to London. No obstacle seems to
have checked their march from the Stour to the Medway." At
Aylesford (A. D. 455), the lowest ford crossing the Medway,
"the British leaders must have taken post for the defence of
West Kent; but the Chronicle of the conquering people tells
... only that Horsa fell in the moment of victory; and the
flint-heap of Horsted which has long preserved his name ...
was held in aftertime to mark his grave. ... The victory of
Aylesford was followed by a political change among the
assailants, whose loose organization around ealdormen was
exchanged for a stricter union. Aylesford, we are told, was no
sooner won than 'Hengest took to the kingdom, and Ælle, his
son.' ... The two kings pushed forward in 457 from the Medway
to the conquest of West Kent." Another battle at the passage
of the Cray was another victory for the invaders, and, "as the
Chronicle of their conquerors tells us, the Britons' forsook
Kent-land and fled with much fear to London.' ... If we trust
British tradition, the battle at Crayford was followed by a
political revolution in Britain itself. ... It would seem ...
that the Romanized Britons rose in revolt under Aurelius
Ambrosianus, a descendant of the last Roman general who
claimed the purple as an Emperor in Britain. ... The
revolution revived for a while the energy of the province."
The Jutes were driven back into the Isle of Thanet, and held
there, apparently, for some years, with the help of the strong
fortresses of Richborough and Reculver, guarding the two
mouths of the inlet which then parted Thanet from the
mainland.
{781}
"In 465 however the petty conflicts which had gone on along
the shores of the Wantsum made way for a decisive struggle.
... The overthrow of the Britons at Wipped'sfleet was so
terrible that all hope of preserving the bulk of Kent seems
from this moment to have been abandoned; and ... no further
struggle disturbed the Jutes in its conquest and settlement.
It was only along its southern shore that the Britons now held
their ground. ... A final victory of the Jutes in 473 may mark
the moment when they reached the rich pastures which the Roman
engineers had reclaimed from Romney Marsh. ... With this
advance to the mouth of the Weald the work of Hengest's men
came to an end; nor did the Jutes from this time play any
important part in the attack on the island, for their
after-gains were limited to the Isle of Wight and a few
districts on the Southampton Water."
_J. R. Green,
The Making of England,
chapter 1._
ALSO IN:
_J. M. Lappenberg,
History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings,
volume 1, pages 67-101._
-----------------------------------------------------------
A Logical Outline of English History
IN WHICH THE DOMINANT CONDITIONS AND
INFLUENCES ARE DISTINGUISHED BY COLORS.
Physical or material (Orange).
Ethnological (Dark Blue).
Social and political (Green).
Intellectual, moral and religious (Tan).
Foreign (Black).
5th-7th centuries.
Conquest: and settlement by Saxons, Angles and Jutes.
The Island of Britain, separated from the Continent of Europe
by a narrow breadth of sea, which makes friendly commerce easy
and hostile invasion difficult;--its soil in great part
excellent; its northern climate tempered by the humid warmth
of the Gulf Stream; its conditions good for breeding a robust
population, strongly fed upon corn and meats; holding,
moreover, in store, for later times, a rare deposit of iron
and coal, of tin and potter's clay, and other minerals of like
utility; was occupied and possessed by tribes from Northern
Europe, of the strongest race in history; already schooled in
courage and trained to enterprise by generations of sea-faring
adventure; uncorrupted by any mercenary contact with the
decaying civilization of Rome, but ready for the knowledge it
could give.
7th-11th Centuries.
Fused, after much warring with one another and with their
Danish kin, into a nation of Englishmen, they lived, for five
centuries, an isolated life, until their insular and
independent character had become deeply ingrained, and the
primitive system of their social and political
organization--their Townships, their Hundreds, their Shires,
and the popular Moots, or courts, which determined and
administered law in each--was rooted fast; though their king's
power waxed and the nobles and the common people drew farther
apart.
A. D. 1066.--Norman conquest.
Then they were mastered (in the last successful invasion that
their Island ever knew) by another people, sprung from their
own stock, but whose blood had been warmed and whose wit had
been quickened by Latin and Gallic influences in the country
of the Franks.
11th-18th Centuries.
A new social and political system now formed itself in England
as the result:--Feudalism modified by the essential democracy
inherent in Old English institutions--producing a stout
commonality to daunt the lords, and a strong aristocracy to
curb the king.
A. D. 1215. Magna Oharta.
English royalty soon weakened itself yet more by ambitious
strivings to maintain and extend a wide dominion over-sea, in
Normandy and Aquitaine; and was helpless to resist when barons
and commons came together to demand the signing and sealing of
the Great Charter of Englishmen's rights.
A. D. 1265-1295--Parliament.
Out of the conditions which gave birth to Magna Charta there
followed, soon, the development of the English Parliament as a
representative legislature, from the Curia Regis of the Normans
and the Witenagemot of the older English time.
A. D. 1337-1453--The Hundred Years War.
From the woful wars of a hundred years with France, which
another century brought upon it, the nation, as a whole,
suffered detriment, no doubt, and it progress was hindered in
many ways; but politically the people took some good from
the troubled times, because their kings were more dependant on
them for money and men.
A. D. 1453-1485--War of the Roses
So likewise, they were bettered in some ways by the dreadful
civil Wars of the Roses, which distracted England for thirty
years. The nobles well-nigh perished, as an order, in these
wars, while the middle-class people at large suffered relatively
little, in numbers or estate.
A. D. 1348--The Great Plague.
But, previously, the great Plague, by diminishing the ranks of
the laboring class, had raised wages and the standard of living
among them, and had helped, with other causes, to multiply the
small landowners and tenant farmers of the country, increasing
the independent common class.
A. D. 1327-1377--Immigration of Flemish weavers.
Moreover, from the time of Edward III., who encouraged Flemish
weavers to settle in England and to teach their art to his
people, manufactures began to thrive; trade extended; towns
grew in population and wealth, and the great burgher
middle-class rose rapidly to importance and weight in the
land.
A. D. 1485-1603--Absolutism of the Tudors.
But the commons of England were not prepared to make use of
the actual power which they held. The nobles had led them in
the past; it needed time to raise leaders among themselves,
and time to organize their ranks. Hence no new checks on
royalty were ready to replace those constraints which had been
broken by the ruin of great houses in the civil wars, and the
crown made haste to improve its opportunity for grasping
power. There followed, under the Tudors, a period of
absolutism greater than England had known before.
15th-16th Centuries--Renaissance.
But this endured only for the time of the education of the
commons, who conned the lessons of the age with eagerness and
with understanding. The new learning from Greece and Rome; the
new world knowledge that had been found in the West; the new
ideas which the new art of the printer had furnished with
wings,--all these had now gained their most fertile planting
in the English mind. Their flower was the splendid literature
of the Elizabethan age; they ripened fruits more substantial
at a later day.
The intellectual development of the nation tended first toward
a religious independence, which produced two successive
revolts--from Roman Papacy and from the Anglican Episcopacy
that succeeded it.
This religious new departure of the English people gave
direction to a vast expansion of their energies in the outside
world. It led them into war with Spain, and sent forth Drake
and Hawkins and the Buccaneers, to train the sailors and pilot
the merchant adventurers who would soon make England mistress
of all the wide seas.
A. D. 1608-1688.
The Stuarts.
The Civil War.
The Commonwealth.
The Revolution.
Then, when these people, strong, prosperous and intelligent,
had come to be ripely sufficient for self-government, there
fell to them a foolish race of kings, who challenged them to a
struggle which stripped royalty of all but its fictions, and
established the sovereignty of England in its House of Commons
for all time.
18th-19th Centuries.
Science
Invention.
Material progress.
Economic enlightenment.
Unassailable in its island,--taking part in the great wars of
the 18th century by its fleets and its subsidies
chiefly,--busy with its undisturbed labors at home,--vigorous
in its conquests, its settlements and its trade, which it
pushed into the farthest parts of the earth,--creating wealth
and protecting it from spoliation and from waste,--the English
nation now became the industrial and economic school of the
age. It produced the mechanical inventions which first opened
a new era in the life of mankind on the material side; it
attained to the splendid enlightenment of freedom in trade; it
made England the workshop and mart of the world, and it spread
her Empire to every Continent, through all the seas.
--------- End: A Logical Outline of English History --------------------
ENGLAND: A. D. 477-527.
The conquests of the Saxons.
The founding of the kingdoms of Sussex, Wessex and Essex.
"Whilst the Jutes were conquering Kent, their kindred took
part in the war. Ship after ship sailed from the North Sea,
filled with eager warriors. The Saxons now arrived--Ella and
his three sons landed in the ancient territory of the Regni
(A. D. 477-491). The Britons were defeated with great
slaughter, and driven into the forest of Andreade, whose
extent is faintly indicated by the wastes and commons of the
Weald. A general confederacy of the Kings and 'Tyrants' of the
Britons was formed against the invaders, but fresh
reinforcements arrived from Germany; the city of
Andreades-Ceastre was taken by storm, all its inhabitants were
slain and the buildings razed to the ground, so that its site
is now entirely unknown. From this period the kingdom of the
South Saxons was established in the person of Ella; and though
ruling only over the narrow boundary of modern Sussex, he was
accepted as the first of the Saxon Bretwaldas, or Emperors of
the Isle of Britain. Encouraged, perhaps, by the good tidings
received from Ella, another band of Saxons, commanded by
Cerdic and his son Cynric, landed on the neighbouring shore,
in the modern Hampshire (A. D. 494). At first they made but
little progress. They were opposed by the Britons; but
Geraint, whom the Saxon Chroniclers celebrate for his
nobility, and the British Bards extol for his beauty and
valour, was slain (A. D. 501). The death of the Prince of the
'Woodlands of Dyfnaint,' or Damnonia, may have been avenged,
but the power of the Saxons overwhelmed all opposition; and
Cerdic, associating his son Cynric in the dignity, became the
King of the territory which he gained. Under Cynric and his
son Ceaulin, the Saxons slowly, yet steadily, gained ground.
The utmost extent of their dominions towards the North cannot
be ascertained; but they had conquered the town of Bedford;
and it was probably in consequence of their geographical
position (A. D. 571) with respect to the countries of the
Middle and East Saxons, that the name of the West Saxons was
given to this colony. The tract north of the Thames was soon
lost; but on the south of that river and of the Severn, the
successors of Cerdic, Kings of Wessex, continued to extend
their dominions. The Hampshire Avon, which retains its old
Celtic name, signifying 'the Water,' seems at first to have
been their boundary. Beyond this river, the British princes of
Damnonia retained their power; and it was long before the
country as far as the Exe became a Saxon March-land, or
border. About the time that the Saxons under Cerdic and Cynric
were successfully warring against the Britons, another colony
was seen to establish itself in the territory or kingdom
which, from its geographical position, obtained the name of
East Saxony; but whereof the district of the Middle Saxons,
now Middlesex, formed a part. London, as you well know, is
locally included in Middle Saxony; and the Kings of Essex, and
the other sovereigns who afterwards acquired the country,
certainly possessed many extensive rights of sovereignty in
the city. Yet, I doubt much whether London was ever
incorporated in any Anglo-Saxon kingdom; and I think we must
view it as a weak, tributary, vassal state, not very well able
to resist the usurpations of the supreme Lord or Suzerain,
Æscwin, or Ercenwine, who was the first King of the East
Saxons (A. D. 527). His son Sleda was married to Ricola,
daughter to Ethelbert of Kent, who afterwards appears as the
superior, or sovereign of the country; and though Sleda was
King, yet Ethelbert joined in all important acts of
government. This was the fate of Essex--it is styled a
kingdom, but it never enjoyed any political independence,
being always subject to the adjoining kings."
_F. Palgrave,
History of the Anglo Saxons,
chapter 2._
"The descents of [the West Saxons], Cerdic and Cynric, in 495
at the mouth of the Itchen, and a fresh descent on Portchester
in 501, can have been little more than plunder raids; and
though in 508 a far more serious conflict ended in the fall of
5,000 Britons and their chief, it was not till 514 that the
tribe whose older name seems to have been that of the
Gewissas, but who were to be more widely known as the West
Saxons, actually landed with a view to definite conquest."
_J. R. Green,
The Making of England,
chapter 3._