hastily sent to deprecate the wrath of Attila; and his pride was
gratified by the choice of Nomius and Anatolius, two ministers of
consular or patrician rank, of whom the one was great treasurer, and the
other was master-general of the armies of the East. He condescended to
meet these ambassadors on the banks of the river Drenco; and though he
at first affected a stern and haughty demeanor, his anger was insensibly
mollified by their eloquence and liberality. He condescended to pardon
the Emperor, the eunuch, and the interpreter; bound himself by an oath
to observe the conditions of peace; released a great number of captives;
abandoned the fugitives and deserters to their fate; and resigned a
large territory, to the south of the Danube, which he had already
exhausted of its wealth and inhabitants. But this treaty was purchased
at an expense which might have supported a vigorous and successful war:
and the subjects of Theodosius were compelled to redeem the safety of a
worthless favorite by oppressive taxes, which they would more cheerfully
have paid for his destruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Hungary has been successively occupied by three Scythian colonies:
1. The Huns of Attila; 2. The Abares, in the sixth century; and, 3. The
Turks or Magyars, A.D. 889, the immediate and genuine ancestors of the
modern Hungarians, whose connection with the two former is extremely
faint and remote.
[20] Cherefeddin Ali, his servile panegyrist, would afford us many
horrid examples. In his camp before Delhi, Timur massacred one hundred
thousand Indian prisoners who had _smiled_ when the army of their
countrymen appeared in sight. The people of Ispahan supplied seventy
thousand human skulls for the structure of several lofty towers. A
similar tax was levied on the revolt of Bagdad; and the exact account,
which Cherefeddin was not able to procure from the proper officers, is
stated by another historian (Ahmed Arabsiada) at ninety thousand heads.
[21] The Huns themselves still continued to despise the labors of
agriculture: they abused the privilege of a victorious nation; and the
Goths, their industrious subjects, who cultivated the earth, dreaded
their neighborhood, like that of so many ravenous wolves.
[22] The curious narrative of this embassy, which required few
observations, and was not susceptible of any collateral evidence, may be
found in Priscus. But I have not confined myself to the same order; and
I had previously extracted the historical circumstances, which were less
intimately connected with the journey, and business, of the Roman
ambassadors.
[23] M. de Tillemont has very properly given the succession of
chamberlains who reigned in the name of Theodosius. Chrysaphius was the
last, and, according to the unanimous evidence of history, the worst of
these favorites. His partiality for his godfather, the heresiarch
Eutyches, engaged him to persecute the orthodox party.
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN
A.D. 449-579
JOHN R. GREEN CHARLES KNIGHT
If we look for the fatherland of the English race, we must, as
modern historians have clearly shown, direct our search "far away
from England herself." In the fifth century of the Christian era a
region in what is now called Schleswig was known by the name of
Anglen (England). But the inhabitants of this district are believed
to have comprised only a small detached portion of the Engle
(English), while the great body of this people probably dwelt
within the limits of the present Oldenburg and lower Hanover.
On several sides of Anglen were the homes of various tribes of
Saxons and Jutes, and these peoples were all kindred, being members
of one branch (Low German) of the Teutonic family. History first
finds them becoming united through community of blood, of language,
institutions, and customs, although it was too early yet to justify
the historian in giving to them the inclusive name of Englishmen.
They all, however, had part in the conquest of England, and it was
their union in that land that gave birth to the English people.
Little is known of the actual character and life of these people
who made the earliest England, but their Germanic inheritance is
traceable in their social and political framework, which already
prefigured the national organization that through centuries of
gradual development became modern England.
Out of their early modes grew the forms of English citizenship and
legislation, and the individual and public freedom which has slowly
broadened down from generation to generation. Later came the
modifying, if not transforming, influence of Christianity,
replacing the ancient nature-worship which they took with them to
their new home. On these foundations the English race, as it has
grown up in the land they made their own, and in other lands to
which like men and institutions have been carried, has reared its
various structures of nationality.
JOHN R. GREEN
Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the empire, and
they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; before the close
of the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The
piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land
which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by
English feet. This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its
coast the island was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In
the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it
to the Roman world; and a century after Cæsar's landing the emperor
Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly carried out.
Before thirty years were over the bulk of the island had passed beneath
the Roman sway, and the Roman frontier had been carried to the firths of
Forth and of Clyde. The work of civilization followed fast on the work
of the sword. To the last indeed the distance of the island from the
seat of empire left her less Romanized than any other province of the
west. The bulk of the population scattered over the country seem in
spite of imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to their old
language, and to have retained some traditional allegiance to their
native chiefs. But Roman civilisation rested mainly on city life, and in
Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly Roman. In towns such as
Lincoln or York, governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by
massive walls, and linked together by a network of magnificent roads
which reached from one end of the island to the other, manners,
language, political life, all were of Rome.
For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports among which London held the
first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean.
But evils which sapped the strength of the whole empire told at last, on
the province of Britain.
Wealth and population alike declined under a crushing system of
taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry, under a despotism
which crushed out all local independence. And with decay within came
danger from without. For centuries past the Roman frontier had held
back the Barbaric world beyond it--the Parthian of the Euphrates, the
Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine.
In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British
tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from Roman
conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands.
It was this mass of savage barbarism which broke upon the empire as it
sank into decay. In its western dominions the triumph of these
assailants was complete. The Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The
West Goths conquered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom
in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the borderland between Italy and
the Rhone. The East Goths ruled at last in Italy itself.
It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment
the province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were
these its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants
then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon
pirates, as we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern
coasts.
For forty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but
civil strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at
last on the fatal policy by which the empire invited its doom while
striving to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against
barbarian. By the usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was
drawn for this purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengist
and Horsa, at their head.
If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in the land
which from that time they made their own, it is with this landing of
Hengist's war band that English history begins. They landed on the
shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No spot
can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the tread of
English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a
mere lift of ground with a few gray cottages dotted over it, cut off
nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall.
But taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the
right the white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of
Pegwell Bay; far away to the left across gray marsh levels where smoke
wreaths mark the site of Richborough and Sandwich the coast line trends
dimly toward Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the
national tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers;
for the physical changes of the country since the fifth century have
told little on its main features. At the time of Hengist's landing a
broad inlet of sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and
through this inlet the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a
fair wind to what was then the gravel spit of Ebbsfleet.
The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle
fought on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was
hardly over when danger came from the jutes themselves. Their
fellow-pirates must have flocked from the channel to their settlement in
Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the
Englishmen won their first victory over the Britons in forcing their
passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford.
A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove the British forces in
terror upon London; but the ground was soon won back again, and it was
not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had gone on along
the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet.
Here however the overthrow was so terrible that from this moment all
hope of saving northern Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was
only on its southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Ten years
later, in 475, the long contest was over, and with the fall of Lymne,
whose broken walls look from the slope to which they cling over the
great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was
done.
The warriors of Hengist had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of
Sussex between its southern edge and the sea.
This coast was guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall
of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South
Saxons. "Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of
the conquerors, "and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterward
one Briton left."
But Hengist and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed in 495 to the
great downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere
was the strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a
decisive victory at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set
the crown of the West Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest belt
around it checked any further advance; and only a year after Charford
the Britons rallied under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the
invaders as they pressed westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a
great overthrow at Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a
long pause in the Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the
Gewissas rested, a series of victories whose history is lost was giving
to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of
the Thames.
It is probable, however, that the strength of Camulodunum, the
predecessor of our modern Colchester, made the progress of these
assailants a slow and doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled
the East Saxons to occupy the territory to which they have given their
name of Essex a line of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and
Hainault forests checked their farther advance into the island.
Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head,
from the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
unconquered, and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
Saxons and the jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by
the third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen
which was to absorb that of Saxon or Jute and to stamp itself on the
people which sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that
they won.
The Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of
Northumbria and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of
Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the later East Anglia. But it was not
till the moment we have reached that the line of defences which had
hitherto held the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the
Humber and the Trent. This great river line led like a highway into the
heart of Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of
British resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know
nothing. One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the
Yorkshire wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans.
Under the empire political power had centred in the district between the
Humber and the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas
of rich land-owners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the
garrison maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border.
But no record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made
themselves masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their
later settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain.
Seizing the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the
woodland that then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent,
the Engle followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the
line of its tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the
predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle
English, while a small body pushed farther southward, and under the name
of "South Engle" occupied the oölitic upland that forms our present
Northamptonshire.
But the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent
and to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to
make a fresh and desperate stand.
It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused
the West Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested
inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the
hill fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs,
and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames made them masters in 571 of
the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
Pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill
they swooped at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along
the Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued
under their British kings to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil
of an English victory at Deorham, and the line of the great western
river lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West Saxons
penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the
Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in
flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously
the death song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of
white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had
left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through
halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan,
"without fire, without light, without song," their stillness broken only
by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh drink,
heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea,
the island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.
CHARLES KNIGHT
"They" [the Romans], says Bede, "resided within the rampart that Severus
made across the island, on the south side of it; as the cities, temples,
bridges, and paved ways do testify to this day." On the north of the
wall were the nations that no severity had reduced to subjection, and no
resistance could restrain from plunder. At the extreme west of England
were the people of Cornwall, or little Wales, as it was called; having
the most intimate relations with the people of Britannia Secunda, or
Wales; and both connected with the colony of Armorica. The inhabitants
of Cornwall and Wales, we may assume, were almost exclusively of the old
British stock. The abandonment of the country by the Romans had affected
them far less than that change affected the more cultivated country,
that had been the earliest subdued, and for nearly four centuries had
received the Roman institutions and adopted the Roman customs.
But in the chief portion of the island, from the southern and eastern
coasts to the Tyne and the Solway, there was a mixed population, among
whom it would be difficult to trace that common bond which would
constitute nationality. The British families of the interior had become
mingled with the settlers of Rome and its tributaries to whom grants of
land had been assigned as the rewards of military service; and the
coasts from the Humber to the Exe had been here and there peopled with
northern settlers, who had gradually planted themselves among the
Romanized British; and were, we may well believe, among the most active
of those who carried forward the commercial intercourse of Britain with
Gaul and Italy.
When, therefore, we approach the period of what is termed the Saxon
invasion, and hear of the decay, the feebleness, the cowardice, and the
misery of the Britons--all which attributes have been somewhat too
readily bestowed upon the population which the Romans had left
behind--it would be well to consider what these so-called Britons really
were, to enable us properly to understand the transition state through
which the country passed.
Our first native historian is Gildas, who lived in the middle of the
sixth century. "From the early part of the fifth century, when the Greek
and Roman writers cease to notice the affairs of Britain, his narrative,
on whatever authority it may have been founded, has been adopted without
question by Bede and succeeding authors, and accepted, notwithstanding
its barrenness of facts and pompous obscurity, by all but general
consent, as the basis of early English history." Gibbon has justly
pointed out his inconsistencies, his florid descriptions of the
flourishing condition of agriculture and commerce after the departure of
the Romans, and his denunciations of the luxury of the people; when he,
at the same time, describes a race who were ignorant of the arts,
incapable of building walls of defence, or of arming themselves with
proper weapons. When "this monk," as Gibbon calls him, "who, in the
profound ignorance of human life, presumes to exercise the office of
historian," tells us that the Romans, who were occasionally called in to
aid against the Picts and Scots, "give energetic counsel to the timorous
natives, and leave them patterns by which to manufacture arms," we seem
to be reading an account of some remote tribe, to whom the Roman sword
and buckler were as unfamiliar as the musket was to the Otaheitans when
Cook first went among them.
When Gildas describes the soldiers on the wall as "equally slow to fight
and ill-adapted to run away"; and tells the remarkable incident which
forms part of every schoolboy's belief, that the defenders of the wall
were pulled down by great hooked weapons and dashed against the ground,
we feel a pity akin to contempt for a people so stupid and passive, and
are not altogether sorry that the Picts and Scots, "differing one from
another in manners, but inspired with the same avidity for blood," had
come with their bushy beards and their half-clothed bodies, to supplant
so effeminate a race. When he makes this feeble people send an embassy
to a Roman in Gaul to say, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea
throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we
are either slain or drowned," we must wonder at the very straitened
limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.