Britain?”
V
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?
I have now carried this study through four sections. My object in
writing it is to show that the Roman Empire never perished but was only
transformed; that the Catholic Church, which, in its maturity, it
accepted, caused it to survive and was, in that origin of Europe, and
has since remained, the soul of one Western civilization.
In the first chapter I sketched the nature of the Roman Empire, in the
second the nature of the Church within the Roman Empire before that
civilization in its maturity accepted the Faith. In the third I
attempted to lay before the reader that transformation and material
decline (it was also a _survival_), which has erroneously been called
“the fall” of the Roman Empire. In the fourth I presented a picture of
what society must have seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of
that transformation and at the entry into what are called the Dark
Ages: the beginnings of the modern European nations which have
superficially differentiated from the old unity of Rome.
I could wish that space had permitted me to describe a hundred other
contemporary things which would enable the reader to seize both the
magnitude and the significance of the great change from Pagan to
Christian times. I should in particular have dwelt upon the
transformation of the European mind with its increasing gravity, its
ripening contempt for material things, and its resolution upon the
ultimate fate of the human soul, which it now had firmly concluded to
be personally immortal and subject to a conscious destiny.
This doctrine of _personal_ immortality is the prime mark of the
European and stamps his leadership upon the world.
Its original seat—long before history begins—lay perhaps in Ireland,
later in Britain, certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or
in Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece and even had some influence
upon the Jews before the Romans subdued them. But it remained an
opinion, an idea looming in the dark, till it was seen strong and
concrete in the full light of the Catholic Church. Oddly enough,
Mahomet, who in most things reacted towards weakness of flesh and
spirit, adopted this Western doctrine fully; it provided his system
with its vigor. Everywhere is that doctrine of immortality the note of
superior intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with the
thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Everywhere does it accompany
health and decision.
Its only worthy counterpart (equally European but rare, uprooted and
private) is the bold affirmation of complete and final death.
The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and
the fifth was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by
its acceptation of the Faith.
To this I might have attached the continued carelessness for the
plastic arts and for much in letters, the continued growth in holiness,
and all that “salting,” as it were, which preserved civilization and
kept it whole until, after the long sequestration of the Dark Ages, it
should discover an opportunity for revival.
My space has not permitted me to describe these things, I must turn at
once to the last, and what is for my readers the chief, of the
historical problems presented by the beginning of the Dark Ages. That
problem is the fate of Britain.
The importance of deciding what happened in Britain when the central
government of Rome failed, does not lie in the fact that an historical
conclusion one way or the other can affect the truth. European
civilization is still one whether men see that unity or no. The
Catholic Church is still the soul of it, whether men know it or do not
know it. But the problem presented by the fate of Britain at that
critical moment when the provinces of the Roman Empire became
independent of any common secular control, has this practical
importance: that those who read it wrongly and who provide their
readers with a false solution (as the Protestant German school and
their copiers in English, Freeman, Green and the rest have done) those
who talk of “the coming of the English,” “the Anglo-Saxon conquest,”
and the rest, not only furnish arguments against the proper unity of
our European story but also produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such
men as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the
entry into the Dark Ages, take for granted many other things
historically untrue. Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else
that is historical truth: for instance, the character of the Normans;
and even contemporary and momentous truth before our eyes today: for
instance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. They not only
render an Englishman ignorant of his own nation and therefore of
himself, they also render all men ignorant of Europe: for a knowledge
of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the period 1530-1630 is the test
of European history: and if you are wrong on these two points you are
wrong on the whole.
A man who desires to make out that the Empire—that is European
civilization—was “conquered” by barbarians cannot today, in the light
of modern research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, or in
the valley of the Rhine. The old German thesis of a barbaric “conquest”
upon the Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has
necessarily been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries
to make out a plausible case when it speaks of Britain, because so much
of the record here is lost that there is more room for make-believe;
and having made it out, the tale of a German and barbaric England, his
false result will powerfully affect modern and immediate conclusions
upon our common civilization, upon our institutions, and their nature,
and in particular upon the Faith and its authority in Europe.
For if _Britain_ be something other than _England_: if what we now know
is not original to this Island, but is of the Northern German barbarism
in race and tradition, if, in the breakdown of the Roman Empire,
Britain was the one exceptional province which really did become a
separate barbaric thing, cut off at the roots from the rest of
civilization, then those who desire to believe that the institutions of
Europe are of no universal effect, that the ancient laws of the Empire
as on property and marriage—were local, and in particular that the
Reformation was the revolt of a race—and of a strong and conquering
race—against the decaying traditions of Rome, have something to stand
on. It does not indeed help them to prove that our civilization is bad
or that the Faith is untrue, but it permits them to despair of, or to
despise, the unity of Europe, and to regard the present Protestant
world as something which is destined to supplant that unity.
Such a point of view is wrong historically as it is wrong in morals. It
will find no basis of military success in the future any more than it
has in the past. [Footnote: I wrote and first printed these words in
1912. I leave them standing with greater force in 1920.] It must
ultimately break down if ever it should attempt to put into practice
its theory of superiority in barbaric things. But meanwhile as a
self-confident theory it can do harm indefinitely great by warping a
great section of the European mind; bidding it refer its character to
imaginary barbaric origins, so divorcing it from the majestic spirit of
Western Civilization. The North German “Teutonic” school of false
popular history can create its own imaginary past, and lend to such a
figment the authority of antiquity and of lineage.
To show how false this modern school of history has been, but also what
opportunities it had for advancing its thesis, is the object of what
follows.
Britain, be it remembered, is today the only part of the Roman world in
which a conscious antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilization
of Europe exists. The Northern Germanies and Scandinavia, which have
had, since the Reformation, a religious agreement with all that is
still politically powerful in Britain, lay outside the old
civilization. They would not have survived the schism of the sixteenth
century had Britain resisted that schism. When we come to deal with the
story of the Reformation in Britain, we shall see how the strong
popular resistance to the Reformation nearly overcame that small
wealthy class which used the religious excitement of an active minority
as an engine to obtain material advantage for themselves. But as a fact
in _Britain_ the popular resistance to the Reformation failed. A
violent and almost universal persecution directed, in the main by the
wealthier classes, against the religion of the English populace and the
wealth which endowed it just happened to succeed. In little more than a
hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle. By the year 1600
the Faith of the British masses had been stamped out from the Highlands
to the Channel.
It is our business to understand that this phenomenon, the moral
severance of Britain from Europe, was a phenomenon of the sixteenth
century and not of the fifth, and that Britain was in no way
predestined by race or tradition to so lamentable and tragic a loss.
Let us state the factors in the problem.
The main factor in the problem is that the history of Great Britain
from just before the middle of the fifth century (say the years 420 to
445) until the landing of St. Augustine in 597 is a blank.
It is of the first importance to the student of the general history in
Europe to seize this point. It is true of no other Roman western
province, and the truth of it has permitted a vast amount of empty
assertion, most of it recent, and nearly all of it as demonstrably (as
it is obviously) created by a religious bias. When there is no proof or
record men can imagine almost anything, and the anti-Catholic
historians have stretched imagination to the last possible limit in
filling this blank with whatever could tell against the continuity of
civilization.
It is the business of those who love historic truth to get rid of such
speculations as of so much rubbish, and to restore to the general
reader the few certain facts upon which he can solidly build.
Let me repeat that, had Britain remained true to the unity of Europe in
that unfortunate oppression of the sixteenth century which ended in the
loss of the Faith, had the populace stood firm or been able to succeed
in the field and under arms, or to strike terror into their oppressors
by an efficient revolt, in other words had the England of the Tudors
remained Catholic, the solution of this ancient problem of the early
Dark Ages would present no immediate advantage, nor perhaps would the
problem interest men even academically. England would now be one with
Europe as she had been for a thousand years before the uprooting of the
Reformation. But, as things are, the need for correction is immediate
and its success of momentous effect. No true historian, even though he
should most bitterly resent the effect of Catholicism upon the European
mind, can do other than combat what was, until quite recently, the
prevalent teaching with regard to the fate of Britain when the central
government of the Empire decayed.
I will first deal with the evidence—such as it is—which has come down
to us upon the fate of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries,
and next consider the conclusions to which such evidence should lead
us.
THE EVIDENCE
When we have to deal with a gap in history (and though none in Western
European history is so strangely empty as this, yet there are very many
minor ones which enable us to reason from their analogy), two methods
of bridging the gap are present to the historian. The first is research
into such rare contemporary records as may illustrate the period: the
second is the parallel of what has happened elsewhere in the same case,
or better still (when that is possible) the example of what was
proceeding in similar places and under similar circumstances at the
same time. And there is a third thing: both of these methods must be
submitted to the criterion of common sense more thoroughly and more
absolutely than the evidence of fuller periods. For when you have full
evidence, even of a thing extraordinary, you must admit its truth. But
when there is little evidence guess-work comes in, and common sense is
the correction of guess-work.
If, for instance, I learn, as I can learn from contemporary records and
from the witness of men still living, that at the battle of Gettysburg
infantry advanced so boldly as to bayonet gunners at their guns, I must
believe it although the event is astonishing.
If I learn, as I can learn, that a highly civilized and informed
government like that of the French in 1870, entering into a war against
a great rival, had only the old muzzle-loading cannon when their
enemies were already equipped with modern breech-loading pieces, I must
accept it on overwhelming evidence, in spite of my astonishment.
When even the miraculous appears in a record—if its human evidence is
multiple, converging and exact—I must accept it or deny the value of
human evidence.
But when I am dealing with a period or an event for which evidence is
lacking or deficient, then obviously it is a sound criterion of
criticism to accept the probable and not to presuppose the improbable.
Common sense and general experience are nowhere more necessary than in
their application, whether in a court of law or in the study of
history, to those problems whose difficulty consists in the absence of
direct proof. [Footnote: For instance, there is no contemporary account
mentioning London during the last half of the fifth and nearly all the
sixth century. Green, Freeman, Stubbs, say (making it up as they go
along) that London ceased to exist: disappeared! Then (they assert)
after a long period of complete abandonment it was laboriously cleared
by a totally new race of men and as laboriously rebuilt on exactly the
same site. The thing is not physically impossible, but it is so
exceedingly improbable that common sense laughs at it.]
Remembering all this, let us first set down what is positively known
from record with regard to the fate of Britain in the hundred and fifty
years of “the gap.”
We begin by noting that there were many groups of German soldiery in
Britain before the Pirate raids and that the southwest was—whether on
account of earlier pirate raids or on account of Saxon settlers the
descendants of Roman soldiers—called “the Saxon shore” long before the
Imperial system broke down.
Next we turn to documents.
There is exactly one contemporary document professing to tell us
anything at all of what happened within this considerable period,
exactly one document set down by a witness; and that document is almost
valueless for our purpose.
It bears the title, _De Excidio Brittaniæ Liber Querulus_. St. Gildas,
a monk, was its author. The exact date of its compilation is a matter
of dispute—necessarily so, for the whole of that time is quite dark.
But it is certainly not earlier than 545. So it was written one hundred
years after the beginning of that darkness which covers British history
for one hundred and fifty years; most of the Roman regulars had been
called away for a continental campaign in 410. They had often so left
the island before. But this time the troops sent out on expedition did
not return. Britain was visited in 429 and 447 by men who left records.
It was not till 597 that St. Augustine landed. St. Augustine landed
only fifty years at the most after Gildas wrote his _Liber Querulus_,
whereas the snapping of the links between the Continent and
southeastern Britain had taken place at least a hundred years before.
Well, it so happens that this book is, as I have called it, almost
valueless for history. It is good in morals; its author complains, as
all just men must do in all times, of the wickedness of powerful men,
and of the vices of princes. It is a homily. The motive of it is not
history, but the reformation of morals. In all matters extending to
more than a lifetime before that of the writer, in all matters, that
is, on which he could not obtain personal evidence, he is hopelessly at
sea. He is valuable only as giving us the general impression of
military and social struggles as they struck a monk who desired to make
them the text of a sermon.
He vaguely talks of Saxon auxiliaries from the North Sea being hired
(in the traditional Roman manner) by some Prince in Roman Britain to
fight savages who had come out of the Highlands of Scotland and were
raiding. He says this use of new auxiliaries began after the Third
Consulship of Aëtius (whom he calls “Agitius”), that is, after 446 A.D.
He talks still more vaguely of the election of local kings to defend
the island from the excesses of these auxiliaries. He is quite as much
concerned with the incursions of robber bands of Irish and Scotch into
the civilized Roman province as he is with the few Saxon auxiliaries
who were thus called in to supplement the arms of the Roman
provincials.
He speaks only of a handful of these auxiliaries, three boatloads; but
he is so vague and ill-instructed on the whole of this early period—a
hundred years before his time—that one must treat his account of the
transaction as half legendary. He tells us that “more numerous
companies followed,” and we know what that means in the case of the
Roman auxiliaries throughout the Empire, a few thousand armed men.
He goes on to say that these auxiliaries mutinying for pay (another
parallel to what we should expect from the history of all the previous
hundred years all over Europe), threatened to plunder the civil
population. Then comes one sentence of rhetoric saying how they ravaged
the countrysides “in punishment for our previous sins,” until the
“flames” of the tumult actually “licked the Western Ocean.” It is all
(and there is much more) just like what we read in the rhetoric of the
lettered men on the Continent who watched the comparatively small but
destructive bands of barbarian auxiliaries in revolt, with their
accompaniment of escaped slaves and local ne’er-do-wells, crossing Gaul
and pillaging. If we had no record of the continental troubles but that
of some one religious man using a local disaster as the opportunity for
a moral discourse, historians could have talked of Gaul exactly as they
talk of Britain on the sole authority of St. Gildas. All the
exaggeration to which we are used in continental records is here: the
“gleaming sword” and the “flame crackling,” the “destruction” of cities
(which afterward quietly continue an unbroken life!) and all the rest
of it. We know perfectly well that on the Continent similar language
was used to describe the predatory actions of little bodies of
barbarian auxiliaries; actions calamitous and tragic no doubt, but not
universal and in no way finally destructive of civilization.
It must not be forgotten that St. Gildas also tells us of the return
home of many barbarians with plunder (which is again what we should
have expected). But at the end of this account he makes an interesting
point which shows that—even if we had nothing but his written record to
judge by—the barbarian pirates had got some sort of foothold on the
eastern coasts of the island.
For after describing how the Romano-British of the province organized
themselves under one Ambrosius Aurelianus, and stood their ground, he
tells us that “sometimes the citizens” (that is, the Roman and
civilized men) “sometimes the enemy were successful,” down to the
thorough defeat of some raiding body or other of the Pagans at an
unknown place which he calls “Mons Badonicus.” This decisive action, he
also tells us, took place in the year of his own birth.
Now the importance of this last point is that Gildas after that date
can talk of things which he really knew. Let anyone who reads this page
recall a great event contemporary with or nearly following his own
birth, and see how different is his knowledge of it from his knowledge
of that which came even a few years before. This is so today with all
the advantages of full record. How much greater would be the contrasts
between things really known and hearsay when there was none!
This defeat of the pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon Gildas calls the last but
not the least slaughter of the barbarians; and though he probably wrote
in the West of Britain, yet we know certainly from his contemporary
evidence _that during the whole of his own lifetime up to the writing
of his book_—a matter of some forty-four years—there was no more
serious fighting. In other words, we are _certain_ that the little
pagan courts settled on the east coast of Britain were balanced by a
remaining mass of declining Roman civilization elsewhere, and that
there was no attempt at anything like expansion or conquest from the
east westward. For this state of affairs, remember, we have direct
contemporary evidence during the whole lifetime of a man and up to
within at the most fifty years—perhaps less—from the day when St.
Augustine landed in Kent and restored record and letters to the east
coast.
We have more rhetoric and more homilies about the “deserted cities and
the wickedness of men and the evil life of the Kings;” but that you
might hear at any period. All we really get from Gildas is: (1) the
confused tradition of a rather heavy predatory raid conducted by
barbaric auxiliaries summoned from across the North Sea in true Roman
fashion to help a Roman province against uncivilized invaders, Scotch
and Irish; (2) (which is most important) the obtaining by these
auxiliary troops or their rulers (though in small numbers it is true),
of political power over some territory within the island; (3) the early
cessation of any racial struggle, or conflict between Christian and
Pagan, or between Barbarian and Roman; even of so much as would strike
a man living within the small area of Britain, and the confinement of
the new little pagan Pirate courts to the east coast during the whole
of the first half of the sixth century.
Here let us turn the light of common sense on to these most imperfect,
confused and few facts which Gildas gives us. What sort of thing would
a middle-aged man, writing in the decline of letters and with nothing
but poor and demonstrably distorted verbal records to go by, set down
with regard to a piece of warfare, if (a) that man were a monk and a
man of peace, (b) his object were obviously not history, but a sermon
on morals, and (c) the fighting was between the Catholic Faith, which
was all in all to the men of his time, and Pagans? Obviously he would
make all he could of the old and terrified legends of the time long
before his birth, he would get more precise as his birth approached
(though always gloomy and exaggerating the evil), and he would begin to
tell us precise facts with regard to the time he could himself
remember. Well, all we get from St. Gildas is the predatory incursions
of pagan savages from Scotland and Ireland, long, long before he was
born; a small number of auxiliaries called in to help the Roman
Provincials against these; the permanent settlement of these
auxiliaries in some quarter or other of the island (we know from other
evidence that it was the east and southeast coast); and (d) what is of
capital importance because it is really contemporary, _the settling
down of the whole matter, apparently during Gildas’ own lifetime in the
sixth century_—from say 500 A.D. or earlier to say 545 or later.
I have devoted so much space to this one writer, whose record would
hardly count in a time where any sufficient historical document
existed, because his book is _absolutely the only one contemporary
piece of evidence we have upon the pirate, or Saxon, raiding of
Britain_. [Footnote: The single sentence in Prosper is
insignificant—and what is more, demonstrably false as it stands.] There
are interesting fragments about it in the various documents known (to
us) collectively today as “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”—but these
documents were compiled many hundreds of years afterwards and had
nothing better to go on than St. Gildas himself and possibly a few
vague legends.