contemporary must be considered as evidence of a kind. It is sober and
full, written by one of the really great men of Catholic and European
civilization, written in a spirit of wide judgment and written by a
founder of history, the Venerable Bede.
True, the Venerable Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_ was not produced
until _three hundred years after_ the first raids of these predatory
bands, not until nearly two hundred years after St. Gildas, and not
until one hundred and forty years after reading and writing and the
full tide of Roman civilization had come back to Eastern Britain with
St. Augustine: but certain fundamental statements of his are evidence.
Thus the fact that the Venerable Bede takes for granted permanent
pirate settlements (established as regular, if small, states), all the
way along the North Sea coast from the northern part of Britain in
which he wrote, brought down to the central south by Southampton Water,
is a powerful or rather a conclusive argument in favor of the existence
of such states some time before he wrote. It is not credible that a man
of this weight would write as he does without solid tradition behind
him; and he tells us that the settlers on this coast of Britain came
from three lowland Frisian tribes, German and Danish, called Saxons,
Jutes and Angles.
The first name “Saxon” was _at that time_ the name of certain pirates
inhabiting two or three small islands on the coasts between the Elbe
and the Rhone. [Footnote: The name has retained a vague significance
for centuries and is now attached to a population largely Slavonic and
wholly Protestant, south of Berlin—hundred of miles from its original
seat.] Ptolemy puts these “Saxons” two hundred years earlier, just
beyond the mouth of the Elbe; the Romans knew them as scattered pirates
in the North Sea, irritating the coasts of Gaul and Britain for
generations. The name later spread to a large island confederation: but
that was the way with German tribal names. The German tribal names do
not stand for fixed races or even provinces, but for chance
agglomerations which suddenly rise and as suddenly disappear. The local
term, “Saxon,” in the fifth and sixth century had nothing to do with
the general term, “Saxon,” applied to all northwest of the Germanies
two hundred years and more afterwards. These pirates then provided
small bands of fighting men under chieftains who founded small
organized governments north of the Thames Estuary, at the head of
Southampton Water, and on the Sussex coast, when they may or may not
have found (but more probably _did_ find) existing settlements of their
own people already established as colonies by the Romans. The chiefs
very probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but
seem rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence.
They learnt no new language, but continued to talk that of their
original seat on the Continent, which language was split up into a
number of local dialects, each of which was a mixture of original
German and adopted Greek, Latin and even Celtic words.
Of the Jutes we know nothing; there is a mass of modern guess work
about them, valueless like all such stuff. We must presume that they
were an insignificant little tribe who sent out a few mercenaries for
hire; but they had the advantage of sending out the first, for the
handful of mercenaries whom the Roman British called into Kent were by
all tradition Jutish. The Venerable Bede also bears witness to an
isolated Jutish settlement in the Meon Valley near Southampton Water,
comparable to the little German colonies established by the Romans at
Bayeux in Normandy and near Rennes.
The Angles were something more definite; they held that corner of land
where the neck of Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This we know
for certain. There was a considerable immigration of them; enough to
make their departure noticeable in the sparsely populated heaths of
their district, and to make Bede record the traveler’s tale that their
barren country still looked “depopulated.” How many boatloads of them,
however, may have come, we have of course no sort of record: we only
know from our common sense that the number must have been insignificant
compared with the total free and slave population of a rich Roman
province. Their chiefs got a hold of the land far above the Thames
Estuary, in scattered spots all up the east coast of Britain, as far as
the Firth of Forth.
There are no other authorities. There is no other evidence save St.
Gildas, a contemporary and—two hundred years after him, _three_ hundred
after the first event—Bede. A mass of legend and worse nonsense called
the _Historia Brittonum_ exists indeed for those who consult it—but it
has no relation to historical science nor any claim to rank as
evidence. As we have it, it is centuries late, and it need not concern
serious history. Even for the existence of Arthur—to which it is the
principal witness—popular legend is a much better guide. As to the
original dates of the various statements in the _Historia Brittonum_,
those dates are guesswork. The legendary narrative as a whole, though
very ancient in its roots, dates only from a period subsequent to
Charlemagne, much more than a century later than Bede and a time far
less cultured.
The life of St. Germanus, who came and preached in Britain after the
Roman legions had left, is contemporary, and deals with events sixty
years before St. Gildas’ birth. It would be valuable if it told us
anything about the Pirate settlements on the coast—whether these were
but the confirmation of older Roman Saxon garrisons or Roman
agricultural colonies or what—but it tells us nothing about them. We
know that St. Germanus dealt in a military capacity with “Picts and
Scots”—an ordinary barbarian trouble—but we have no hint at Saxon
settlements. St. Germanus was last in Britain in 447, and it is good
negative evidence that we hear nothing during that visit of any real
trouble from the Saxon pirates who at that very time might be imagined,
if legend were to be trusted, to be establishing their power in Kent.
That ends the list of witnesses; that is all our _evidence_. [Footnote:
On such a body of evidence—less than a morning’s reading—did Green
build up for popular sale his romantic _Making of England_.] To sum up.
So far as recorded history is concerned, all we know is this: that
probably some, but certainly only few, of the Roman regular forces were
to be found garrisoned in Britain after the year 410; that in the Roman
armies there had long been Saxon and other German auxiliaries some of
whom could naturally provide civilian groups and that Rome even planted
agricultural colonies of auxiliaries permanently within the Empire;
that the south and east coasts were known as “the Saxon shore” even
during Imperial times; that the savages from Scotland and Ireland
disturbed the civilized province cruelly; that scattered pirates who
had troubled the southern and eastern coasts for two centuries, joined
the Scotch and Irish ravaging bands; that some of these were taken in
as regular auxiliaries on the old Roman model, somewhere about the
middle of the fifth century (the conventional date is 445); that, as
happened in many another Roman province, the auxiliaries mutinied for
pay and did a good deal of bad looting and ravaging; finally that the
ravaging was checked, and that the Pirates were thrown back upon some
permanent settlements of theirs established during these disturbances
along the easternmost and southernmost coasts. Their numbers must have
been very small compared with the original population. No town of any
size was destroyed.
Now it is most important in the face of such a paucity of information
to seize three points:
First, that the ravaging was not appreciably worse, either in the way
it is described or by any other criterion, than the troubles which the
Continent suffered at the same time and which (as we know) did not
_there_ destroy the continuity or unity of civilization.
Secondly, that the sparse raiders, Pagan (as were also some few of
those on the Continent) and incapable of civilized effort, obtained, as
they did upon the Continent (notably on the left bank of the Rhine),
little plots of territory which they held and governed for themselves,
and in which after a short period the old Roman order decayed in the
incapable hands of the newcomers.
But, thirdly (and upon this all the rest will turn), the _position
which these less civilized and pagan small courts happened permanently
to hold, were positions that cut the link between the Roman province of
Britain and the rest of what had been the united Roman Empire_.
This last matter—not numbers, not race—is the capital point in the
story of Britain between 447 and 597.
The uncivilized man happened, by a geographical accident, to have cut
the communication of the island with its sister provinces of the
Empire. He was numerically as insignificant, racially as unproductive
and as ill provided with fruitful or permanent institutions as his
brethren on the Rhine or the Danube. But on the Rhine and the Danube
the Empire was broad. If a narrow fringe of it was ruined it was no
great matter: only a retreat of a few miles. Those sea communications
between Britain and Europe were narrow—and the barbarian had been
established across them.
The circulation of men, goods and ideas was stopped for one hundred and
fifty years because the small pirate settlements (mixed perhaps with
barbarian settlements already established by the Empire) had, by the
gradual breakdown of the Roman ports, destroyed communication with
Europe from Southampton Water right north to beyond the Thames.
It seems certain that even the great town of London, whatever its
commercial relations, kept up no official or political business beyond
the sea. The pirates had not gone far inland; but, with no intention of
conquest (only of loot or continued establishment), they had snapped
the bond by which Britain lived.
Such is the direct evidence, and such our first conclusion on it.
But of indirect indications, of reasonable supposition and comparison
between what came after the pirate settlements and what had been
before, there is much more. By the use of this secondary matter added
to the direct evidence one can fully judge both the limits and the
nature of the misfortune that overtook Britain after the central Roman
government failed and before the Roman missionaries, who restored the
province to civilization, had landed.
We may then arrive at a conclusion and know what that Britain was to
which the Faith returned with St. Augustine. When we know that, we
shall know what Britain continued to be until the catastrophe of the
Reformation.
I say that, apart from the direct evidence of St. Gildas and the late
but respectable traditions gathered by the Venerable Bede, the use of
other and indirect forms of evidence permits us to be certain of one or
two main facts, and a method about to be described will enable us to
add to these a half-dozen more; the whole may not be sufficient,
indeed, to give us a general picture of the time, but it will prevent
us from falling into any radical error with regard to the place of
Britain in the future unity of Europe when we come to examine that
unity as it re-arose in the Middle Ages, partly preserved, partly
reconstituted, by the Catholic Church.
The historical method to which I allude and to which I will now
introduce the reader may properly be called that of _limitations_.
We may not know what happened between two dates; but if we know pretty
well how things stood for some time before the earlier date and for
sometime after the later one, then we have two “jumping off places,” as
it were, from which to build our bridge of speculation and deduction as
to what happened in the unexplored gap of time between.
Suppose every record of what happened in the United States between 1862
and 1880 to be wiped out by the destruction of all but one insufficient
document, and supposing a fairly full knowledge to survive of the
period between the Declaration of Independence and 1862, and a
tolerable record to survive of the period between 1880 and the present
year. Further, let there be ample traditional memory and legend that a
civil war took place, that the struggle was a struggle between North
and South, and that its direct and violent financial and political
effects were felt for over a decade.
The student hampered by the absence of direct evidence might make many
errors in detail and might be led to assert, as probably true, things
at which a contemporary would smile. But by analogy with other
contemporary countries, by the use of his common sense and his
knowledge of human nature, of local climate, of other physical
conditions, and of the motives common to all men, he would arrive at a
dozen or so general conclusions which would be just. What came after
the gap would correct the deductions he had made from his knowledge of
what came before it. What came before the gap would help to correct
false deductions drawn from what came after it. His knowledge of
contemporary life in Europe, let us say, or in western territories
which the war did not reach, between 1862 and 1880, would further
correct his conclusions.
If he were to confine himself to the most general conclusions he could
not be far wrong. He would appreciate the success of the North and how
much that success was due to numbers. He would be puzzled perhaps by
the different positions of the abolitionist theory before and after the
war; but he would know that the slaves were freed in the interval, and
he would rightly conclude that their freedom had been a direct
historical consequence and contemporary effect of the struggle. He
would be equally right in rejecting any theory of the colonization of
the Southern States by Northerners; he would note the continuity of
certain institutions, the non-continuity of others. In general, if he
were to state first what he was sure of, secondly, what he could fairly
guess, his brief summary, though very incomplete, would not be _off the
rails_ of history; he would not be employing such a method to produce
historical nonsense, as so many of our modern historians have done in
their desire to prove the English people German and barbaric in their
origins.
This much being said, let me carefully set down what we know with
regard to Britain before and after the bad gap in our records, the
unknown one hundred and fifty years between the departure of St.
Germanus and the arrival of St. Augustine.
We know that before the bulk of Roman regulars left the country in 410,
Britain was an organized Roman province. Therefore, we know that it had
regular divisions, with a town as the centre of each, many of the towns
forming the Sees of the Bishops. We know that official records were
kept in Latin and that Latin was the official tongue. We further know
that the island at this time had for generations past suffered from
incursions of Northern barbarians in great numbers over the Scottish
border and from piratical raids of seafarers (some Irish, others
Germanic, Dutch and Danish in origin) in much lesser numbers, for the
amount of men and provisions conveyable across a wide sea in small
boats is highly limited.
Within four years of the end of the sixth century, nearly two hundred
years after the cessation of regular Roman government, missionary
priests from the Continent, acting on a Roman episcopal commission,
land in Britain; from that moment writing returns and our chronicles
begin again. What do they tell us?
First, that the whole island is by that time broken up into a number of
small and warring districts. Secondly, that these numerous little
districts, each under its petty king or prince, fall into two
divisions: some of these petty kings and courts are evidently
Christian, Celtic-speaking and by all their corporate tradition inherit
from the old Roman civilization. The other petty kings and courts speak
various “Teutonic” dialects, that is, dialects made up of a jargon of
original German words and Latin words mixed. The population of the
little settlements under these eastern knights spoke, apparently, for
the most part the same dialects as their courts. Thirdly, we find that
these courts and their subjects are not only mainly of this speech, but
also, in the mass, pagan. There may have been relics of Catholicism
among them, but at any rate the tiny courts and petty kinglets were
pagan and “Teutonic” in speech. Fourthly, the divisions between these
two kinds of little states were such that the decayed Christians were,
when St. Augustine came, roughly-speaking in the West and centre of the
island, the Pagans on the coasts of the South and the East.
All this tallies with the old and distorted legends and traditions, as
it does with the direct story of Gildas, and also with whatever of real
history may survive in the careful compilation of legend and tradition
made by the Venerable Bede.
The _first_ definite historical truth which we derive from this use of
the method of limitations, is of the same sort as that to which the
direct evidence of Gildas leads us. A series of settlements had been
effected upon the coasts of the North Sea and the eastern part of the
Channel from, let us say, Dorsetshire or its neighborhood, right up to
the Firth of Forth. They had been effected by the North Sea pirates and
their foothold was good.
Now let us use this method of limitations for matters a little less
obvious, and ask, first, what were the limits between these two main
groups of little confused and warring districts; secondly, how far was
either group coherent; thirdly, what had survived in either group of
the old order; and, fourthly, what novel thing had appeared during the
darkness of this century-and-a-half or two centuries? [Footnote: A
century-and-a-half from the very last Roman evidence, the visit of St.
Germanus in 447 to the landing of St. Augustine exactly 150 years later
(597); nearly two centuries from the withdrawal of the expeditionary
Roman Army to the landing of St. Augustine (410-597).]
Taking these four points _seriatim_:
(1) Further inland than about a day’s march from the sea or from the
estuaries of rivers, we have no proof of the settlement of the pirates
or the formation by them of local governments. It is impossible to fix
the boundaries in such a chaos, but we know that most of the county of
Kent and the seacoast of Sussex, also all within a raiding distance of
Southampton Water, and of the Hampshire Avon, the maritime part of East
Anglia and of Lincolnshire, so far as we can judge, the East Riding of
Yorkshire, Durham, the coastal part at least of Northumberland and the
Lothians, were under numerous pagan kinglets, whose courts talked this
mixture of German and Latin words called “Teutonic dialects.”
What of the Midlands? The region was a welter, and a welter of which we
can tell very little indeed. It formed a sort of march or borderland
between the two kinds of courts, those of the kinglets and chieftains
who still preserved a tradition of civilization, and those of the
kinglets who had lost that tradition. This mixed borderland tended
apparently to coalesce (the facts of which we have to judge are very
few) under one chief. It was later known not under a Germanic or Celtic
name, but under the low Latin name of “Mercia” that is the
“Borderland.” To the political aspect of this line of demarcation I
will return in a moment.
(2) As to the second question: What kind of cohesion was there between
the western or the eastern sets of these vague and petty governments?
The answer is that the cohesion was of the loosest in either case.
Certain fundamental habits differentiated East from West, language, for
instance, and much more religion. Before the coming of St. Augustine,
all the western and probably most of the central kinglets were
Christians; the kinglets on the eastern coasts Pagan.
There was a tendency in the West apparently to hold together for common
interests, but no longer to speak of one head. But note this
interesting point. The West that felt some sort of common bond, called
itself the _Cymry_, and only concerned the mountain land. It did not
include, it carefully distinguished itself from the Christians of the
more fertile Midlands and South and East, which it called “_Laghans_.”
Along the east coast there was a sort of tradition of common headship,
very nebulous indeed, but existent. Men talked of “chiefs of Britain,”
“_Bretwaldas_,” a word, the first part of which is obviously Roman, the
second part of which may be Germanic or Celtic or anything, and which
we may guess to indicate a titular headship. But—and this must be
especially noted—there was no conscious or visible cohesion among the
little courts of the east and southeast coasts; there was no conscious
and deliberate continued pagan attack against the Western Christians as
such in the end of the sixth century when St. Augustine landed, and no
Western Celtic Christian resistance, organized as such, to the
chieftains scattered along the eastern coast. Each kinglet fought with
each, pagan with pagan, Christian with Christian, Christian and pagan
in alliance against pagan and Christian in alliance—and the cross
divisions were innumerable. You have petty kings on the eastern coasts
with Celtic names; you have Saxon allies in Celtic courts; you have
Western Christian kings winning battles on the coasts of the North Sea
and Eastern kings winning battles nearly as far west as the Severn,
etc., etc. I have said that it is of capital importance to appreciate
this point—that the whole thing was a chaos of little independent
districts all fighting in a hotchpotch and not a clash of warring races
or tongues.
It is difficult for us with our modern experience of great and highly
conscious nations to conceive such a state of affairs. When we think of
fighting and war, we cannot but think of one considerable conscious
_nation_ fighting against another similar _nation_, and this modern
habit of mind has misled the past upon the nature of Britain at the
moment when civilization reëntered the South and East of the island
with St. Augustine. Maps are published with guesswork boundaries
showing the “frontiers” of the “Anglo-Saxon conquest,” at definite
dates, and modern historians are fond of talking of the “limits” of
that conquest being “extended” to such and such points. There were no
“frontiers:” there was no “conquest” either way—of east over west or
west over east. There were no “extending” limits of Eastern (or of
Western) rule. There was no “advance to Chester,” no “conquest of the
district of Bath.” There were battles near Bath and battles near
Chester, the loot of a city, a counter raid by the Westerners and all
the rest of it. But to talk of a gradual “Anglo-Saxon conquest” is an
anachronism.
The men of the time would not have understood such language, for indeed
it has no relation to the facts of the time.
The kinglet who could gather his men from a day’s march round his court
in the lower Thames Valley, fought against the kinglet who could gather
his men from a day’s march round his stronghold at Canterbury. A Pagan
Teutonic-speaking Eastern kinglet would be found allied with a
Christian Celtic-speaking Western kinglet and his Christian followers;
and the allies would march indifferently against another Christian or
another pagan.
There was indeed _later_ a westward movement in language and habit
which I shall mention; that was the work of the Church. So far as
warfare goes there was no movement westward or eastward. Fighting went
on continually in all directions, from a hundred separate centres, and
if there are reliable traditions of an Eastern Pagan kinglet commanding
some mixed host once reaching so far west as to raid the valley of the
Wiltshire Avon and another raiding to the Dee, so there are historical
records of a Western Christian kinglet reaching and raiding the Eastern
settlements right down to the North Sea at Bamborough.