either half of this anarchy? Of Roman government, of Roman order, of
true Roman civilization, of that _palatium_ of which we spoke in a
previous chapter, nothing had anywhere survived. The disappearance of
the Roman taxing and judicial machinery is the mark of Britain’s great
wound. It differentiates the fate of Britain from that of Gaul.
The West of Britain had lost this Roman tradition of government just as
much as the East. The “Pict and Scot” [Footnote: The “Scots”—that is,
the Irish—were, of course, of a higher civilization than the other
raiders of Britain during this dark time. The Catholic Church reached
them early. They had letters and the rest long before Augustine came to
Britain.] and the North Sea pirates, since they could not read or
write, or build or make a road or do anything appreciably
useful—interrupted civilized life and so starved it. The raids did more
to break up the old Roman society than did internal decay. The Western
chieftains who retained the Roman Religion had thoroughly lost the
Roman organization of society before the year 600. The Roman language,
probably only really familiar in the towns, seems to have gone; the
Roman method of building had certainly gone. In the West the learned
could still write, but they must have done so most sparingly, if we are
to judge by the absence of any remains. The Church in some truncated
and starved form, survived indeed in the West; it was the religion to
which an Imperial fragment cut off from all other Roman populations
might be expected to cling. Paganism seems to have died out in the
West; but the mutilated Catholicism that had taken its place became
provincial, ill-instructed, and out of touch with Europe. We may guess,
though it is only guesswork, that its chief ailment came from the
spiritual fervor, ill-disciplined but vivid, of Brittany and of
Ireland.
What had survived in the eastern part of Britain? On the coasts, and up
the estuaries of the navigable rivers? Perhaps in patches the original
language. It is a question whether Germanic dialects had not been known
in eastern Britain long before the departure of the Roman legions. But
anyhow, if we suppose the main speech of the East to have been Celtic
and Latin before the pirate raids, then that main speech had gone.
So, perhaps altogether, certainly for the most part had religion. So
certainly had the arts—reading and writing and the rest. Over-sea
commerce had certainly dwindled, but to what extent we cannot tell. It
is not credible that it wholly disappeared; but on the other hand there
is very little trace of connection with southern and eastern Britain in
the sparse continental records of this time.
Lastly, and perhaps most important, the old bishoprics had gone.
When St. Gregory sent St. Augustine and his missionaries to refound the
old Sees of Britain, his original plan of that refounding had to be
wholly changed. He evidently had some old imperial scheme before him,
in which he conceived of London, the great city, as the Metropolis and
the lesser towns as suffragan to its See. But facts were too strong for
him. He had to restore the Church in the coasts that cut off Britain
from Europe, and in doing so he had to deal with a ruin. Tradition was
lost; and Britain is the only Roman province in which this very great
break in the continuity of the bishoprics is to be discovered.
One thing did _not_ disappear, and that was the life of the towns.
Of course, a Roman town in the sixth or seventh century was not what it
had been in the fourth or fifth; but it is remarkable that in all this
wearing away of the old Roman structure, its framework (which was, and
is, municipal) remained.
If we cast up the principal towns reappearing when the light of history
returns to Britain with St. Augustine’s missionaries, we find that all
of them are Roman in origin; what is more important, we find that the
proportion of _surviving_ Roman towns centuries later, when full
records exist, is even larger than it is in other provinces of the
Empire which we know to have preserved the continuity of civilization.
Exeter (perhaps Norwich), Chester, Manchester, Lancaster, Carlisle,
York, Canterbury, Lincoln, Rochester, Newcastle, Colchester, Bath,
Winchester, Chichester, Gloucester, Cirencester, Leicester, Old
Salisbury, Great London itself—these pegs upon which the web of Roman
civilization was stretched—stood firm through the confused welter of
wars between all these petty chieftains, North Sea Pirate, Welsh and
Cumbrian and Pennine highlander, Irish and Scotch.
There was a slow growth of suburbs and some substitution of new
suburban sites for old city sites—as at Southampton, Portsmouth,
Bristol, Huntingdon, etc. It is what you find all over Europe. But
there was no real disturbance of this scheme of towns until the
industrial revolution of modern times came to diminish the almost
immemorial importance of the Roman cities and to supplant their
economic functions by the huge aggregations of the Potteries, the
Midlands, South Lancashire, the coal fields and the modern ports.
The student of this main problem in European history, the fate of
Britain, must particularly note the phenomenon here described. It is
the capital point of proof that Roman Britain, though suffering
grievously from the Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and Irish raids, and though
cut off for a time from civilization, did survive.
Those who prefer to think of England as a colony of barbarians in which
the European life was destroyed, have to suppress many a truth and to
conceive many an absurdity in order to support their story; but no
absurdity of theirs is _worse_ than the fiction they put forward with
regard to the story of the English towns.
It was solemnly maintained by the Oxford School and its German masters
that these great Roman towns, one after the other, were first utterly
destroyed by the Pirates of the North Sea, then left in ruins for
generations, and then _re-occupied_ through some sudden whim by the
newcomers! It needs no historical learning to laugh at such a fancy;
but historical learning makes it even more impossible than it is
laughable.
Certain rare towns, of course, decayed in the course of centuries: the
same is true, for that matter, of Spain and Gaul and Italy. Some few
here (as many in Spain, in Gaul and in Italy) may have been actually
destroyed in the act of war. There is tradition of something of the
sort at Pevensey (the old port of Anderida in Sussex) and for some time
a forgery lent the same distinction to Wroxeter under the Wrekin. A
great number of towns again (as in every other province of the Empire)
naturally diminished with the effect of time. Dorchester on the Thames,
for instance, seems to have been quite a large place for centuries
after the first troubles with the pirates, though today it is only a
village; but it did not decay as the result of war. Sundry small towns
became smaller still, some few sank to hamlets as generation after
generation of change passed over them: but we find just the same thing
in Picardy in the Roussillon, in Lombardy and in Aquitaine. What did
_not_ happen in Britain was a subversion of the Roman municipal system.
Again, the unwalled settlement outside the walled town often grew at
the expense of the municipality within the walls. I have given
Huntingdon as an example of this; and there is St. Albans, and
Cambridge. But these also have their parallels in every other province
of the West. Even in distant Africa you find exactly the same thing.
You find it in the northern suburb of Roman Paris itself. That suburb
turns into the head of the mediæval town—yet Paris is perhaps the best
example of Roman continuity in all Europe.
The seaports naturally changed in character and often in actual site,
especially upon the flat, and therefore changeable, eastern shores—and
that is exactly what you find in similar circumstances throughout the
tidal waters of the Continent. There is not the shadow or the trace of
any widespread destruction of the Roman towns in Britain. On the
contrary there is, as much or more than elsewhere in the Empire, the
obvious fact of their survival.
The phenomenon is the more remarkable when we consider first that the
names of Roman towns given above do not pretend to be a complete list
(one may add immediately from memory the southern Dorchester, Dover,
Doncaster, etc.), and, secondly, that we have but a most imperfect list
remaining of the towns in Roman Britain.
A common method among those who belittle the continuity of our
civilization, is to deny a Roman origin to any town in which Roman
remains do not happen to have been noted as yet by antiquarians. Even
under that test we can be certain that Windsor, Lewes, Arundel,
Dorking, and twenty others, were seats of Roman habitation, though the
remaining records of the first four centuries tell us nothing of them.
But in nine cases out of ten the mere absence of catalogued Roman
remains proves nothing. The soil of towns is shifted and reshifted
continually generation after generation. The antiquary is not stationed
at every digging of a foundation, or sinking of a well, or laying of a
drain, or paving of a street. His methods are of recent establishment.
We have lost centuries of research, and, even with all our modern
interest in such matters, the antiquary is not informed once in a
hundred times of chance discoveries, unless perhaps they be of coins.
When, moreover, we consider that for fifteen hundred years this turning
and returning of the soil has been going on within the municipalities,
it is ridiculous to affirm that such a place as Oxford, for instance—a
town of importance in the later Dark Ages—had no Roman root, simply
because the modern antiquary is not yet possessed of any Roman remains
recently discovered in it: there may have been no town here before the
fifth century: but it is unlikely.
One further point must be noticed before we leave this prime matter:
had there been any considerable destruction of the Roman towns in
Britain, large and small, we should expect it where the pirate raids
fell earliest and most fiercely. We should expect to find the towns
near the east and the south coast to have disappeared. The historical
truth is quite opposite. The garrison of Anderida indeed and of
Anderida alone (Pevensey) was, if we may trust a vague phrase written
four hundred years later, massacred in war. But Lincoln, York,
Newcastle, Colchester, London, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester,
Chichester, Portchester, Winchester, the very principal examples of
survival, are all of them either right on the eastern and southern
coast or within a day’s striking distance of it.
As to decay, the great garrison centre of the Second Legion, in the
heart of the country which the pirate raiders never reached, has sunk
to be little Caerleon-upon-Usk, just as surely as Dorchester on the
Thames, far away from the eastern coast, has decayed from a town to a
village, and just as surely as Richboro’, an island right on the pirate
coast itself, has similarly decayed! As with destruction, so with
decay, there is no increasing proportion as we go from the west
eastward towards the Pirate settlements.
But the point need not be labored. The supposition that the Roman towns
disappeared is no longer tenable, and the wonder is how so astonishing
an assertion should have lived even for a generation. The Roman towns
survived, and, with them, Britain, though maimed.
(4) Now for the last question: what novel things had come in to Britain
with this break down of the central Imperial authority in the fifth and
sixth centuries? To answer that is, of course, to answer the chief
question of all, and it is the most difficult of all to answer.
I have said that presumably on the South and East the language was new.
There were numerous Germanic troops permanently in Britain before the
legions disappeared, there was a constant intercourse with Germanic
auxiliaries: there were probably colonies, half military, half
agricultural. Some have even thought that “Belgic” tribes, whether in
Gaul or Britain, spoke Teutonic dialects; but it is safer to believe
from the combined evidence of place names and of later traditions, that
there was a real change in the common talk of most men within a march
of the eastern sea or the estuaries of its rivers.
This change in language, if it occurred (and we must presume it did,
though it is not absolutely certain, for there may have been a large
amount of mixed German speech among the people before the Roman
soldiers departed)—this change of language, I say, is the chief novel
matter. The decay of religion means less, for when the pirate raids
began, though the Empire was already officially Christian at its heart,
the Church had only just taken firm root in the outlying parts.
The institutions which arose in Britain everywhere when the central
power of Rome decayed—the meetings of armed men to decide public
affairs, money compensation for injuries, the organizing of society by
“hundreds,” etc., were common to all Europe. Nothing but ignorance can
regard them as imported into Britain (or into Ireland or Brittany for
that matter) by the Pirates of the North Sea. They are things native to
all our European race when it lives simply. A little knowledge of
Europe will teach us that there was nothing novel or peculiar in such
customs. They appear universally among the Iberians as among the Celts,
among the pure Germans beyond the Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians
upon the delta of that river, and the lowlands of the Scheldt and the
Meuse; even among the untouched Roman populations.
Everywhere you get, as the Dark Ages approach and advance, the meetings
of armed men in council, the chieftain assisted in his government by
such meetings, the weaponed assent or dissent of the great men in
conference, the division of the land and people into “hundreds,” the
fine for murder, and all the rest of it.
Any man who says (and most men of the last generation said it) that
among the changes of the two hundred years’ gap was the introduction of
novel institutions peculiar to the Germans, is speaking in ignorance of
the European unity and of that vast landscape of our civilization which
every true historian should, however dimly, possess. The same things,
talked of in a mixture of Germanic and Latin terms between Poole
Harbour and the Bass Rock, were talked of in Celtic terms from the
Start to Glasgow; the chroniclers wrote them down in Latin terms alone
everywhere from the Sahara to the Grampians and from the Adriatic to
the Atlantic. The very Basques, who were so soon to begin the
resistance of Christendom against the Mohammedan in Spain, spoke of
them in Basque terms. But the actual things—the institutions—for which
all these various Latins, Basque, German, and Celtic words stood (the
blood-fine, the scale of money—reparation for injury, division of
society into “hundreds,” the Council advising the Chief, etc.) were
much the same throughout the body of Europe. They will always reappear
wherever men of our European race are thrown into small, warring
communities, avid of combat, jealous of independence, organized under a
military aristocracy and reverent of custom.
Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the Imperial measurements
survived—the measurement of land, the units of money and of length and
weight were all Roman, and nowhere more than in Eastern Britain during
the Dark Ages.
Lastly, let the reader consider the curious point of language. No more
striking _simulacrum_ of racial unity can be discovered than a common
language or set of languages; but it is a _simulacrum_, and a
_simulacrum_ only. It is neither a proof nor a product of true unity.
Language passes from conqueror to conquered, from conquered to
conqueror, almost indifferently. Convenience, accident, and many a
mysterious force which the historian cannot analyze, propagates it, or
checks it. Gaul, thickly populated, organized by but a few garrisons of
Roman soldiers and one army corps of occupation, learns to talk Latin
universally, almost within living memory of the Roman conquest. Yet two
corners of Gaul, the one fertile and rich, the other barren, Amorica
and the Basque lands, never accept Latin. Africa, though thoroughly
colonized from Italy and penetrated with Italian blood as Gaul never
was, retains the Punic speech century after century, to the very ends
of Roman rule—seven hundred years after the fall of Carthage: four
hundred after the end of the Roman Republic!
Spain, conquered and occupied by the Mohammedan, and settled in very
great numbers by a highly civilized Oriental race, talks today a Latin
only just touched by Arabic influence. Lombardy, Gallic in blood and
with a strong infusion of repeated Germanic invasions (very much larger
than ever Britain had!) has lost all trace of Gallic accent, even in
language, save in one or two Alpine valleys, and of German speech
retains nothing but a few rare and doubtful words. The plain of Hungary
and the Carpathian Mountains are a tesselated pavement of languages
quite dissimilar, Mongolian, Teutonic, Slav. The Balkan States have,
_not_ upon their westward or European side, but at their extreme
opposite limit, a population which continues the memory of the Empire
in its speech; and the vocabulary of the Rumanians is _not the Greek of
Byzantium_, which civilized them, but the Latin of Rome!
The most implacable of Mohammedans now under French rule in Algiers
speak, and have spoken for centuries, not Arabic in any form, but
Berber; and the same speech reappears beyond a wide belt of Arabic in
the far desert to the south.
The Irish, a people in permanent contrast to the English, yet talk in
the main the English tongue.
The French-Canadians, accepting political unity with Britain, retain
their tongue and reject English.
Look where we will, we discover in regard to language something as
incalculable as the human will, and as various as human instinct. The
deliberate attempt to impose it has nearly always failed. Sometimes it
survives as the result of a deliberate policy. Sometimes it is restored
as a piece of national protest—Bohemia is an example. Sometimes it
“catches on” naturally and runs for hundreds of miles covering the most
varied peoples and even the most varied civilizations with a common
veil.
Now the Roman towns were not destroyed, the original population was
certainly not destroyed even in the few original settlements of Saxon
and Angles in the sea and river shores of the East. Such civilization
as the little courts of the Pirate chieftains maintained was degraded
Roman or it was nothing. But the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” _language_—the
group of half-German [Footnote: I say “_half_-German” lest the reader
should think, by the use of the word “German” or “Teutonic” that the
various dialects of this sort (including those of the North Sea
Pirates) were something original, uninfluenced by Rome. It must always
be remembered that with their original words and roots was mixed an
equal mass of superior words learned from the civilized men of the
South in the course of the many centuries during which Germans had
served the Romans as slaves and in arms and had met their merchants.]
dialects which may have taken root before the withdrawal of the Roman
legions in the East of Britain, and which at any rate were well rooted
there a hundred years after—stood ready for one of two fates. Either it
would die out and be replaced by dialects half Celtic, half Latin
vocabulary, or it would spread westward. That the Teutonic dialects of
the eastern kinglets should spread westward might have seemed
impossible. The unlettered barbarian does not teach the lettered
civilized man; the pagan does not mold the Christian. It is the other
way about. Yet in point of fact that happened. Why?
Before we answer that question let us consider another point. Side by
side with the entry of civilization through the Roman missionary
priests in Kent, there was going on a missionary effort in the North of
the Island of Britain, which effort was Irish. It had various Celtic
dialects for its common daily medium, though it was, of course, Roman
in ritual at the altar. The Celtic missionaries, had they alone been in
the field, would have made us all Celtic speaking today. But it was the
direct mission from Rome that won, and this for the reason that it had
behind it the full tide of Europe. Letters, order, law, building,
schools, re-entered England through Kent—not through Northumberland
where the Irish were preaching.
Even so the spread westward of a letterless and starved set of dialects
from the little courts of the eastern coasts (from Canterbury and
Bamborough and so forth) would have been impossible but for a
tremendous accident.
St. Augustine, after his landing, proposed to the native British
bishops that they should help in the conversion of the little pagan
kinglets and their courts on the eastern coast. They would not. They
had been cut off from Europe for so long that they had become warped.
They refused communion. The peaceful Roman Mission coming just at the
moment when the Empire had recovered Italy and was fully restoring
itself, was thrown back on the Eastern courts. It used them. It backed
_their_ tongue, _their_ arms, _their_ tradition. The terms of Roman
things were carefully translated by the priests into the Teutonic
dialects of these courts; the advance of civilization under the
missionaries, recapturing more and more of the province of Britain,
proceeded westward from the courts of the Eastern kinglets. The
schools, the official world—all—was now turned by the weight of the
Church against a survival of the Celtic tongues and in favor of the
Eastern Teutonic ones.
Once civilization had come back by way of the South and East,
principally through the natural gate of Kent and through the Straits of
Dover which had been blocked so long, this tendency of the Eastern
dialects to spread as the language of an organized clerical officialdom
and of its courts of law, was immediately strengthened. It soon and
rapidly swamped all but the western hills. But of colonization, of the
advance of a race, there was none. What advanced was the Roman
organization once more and, with it, the dialects of the courts it
favored.
What we know, then, of Britain when it was re-civilized we know through
Latin terms or through the half-German dialects which ultimately and
much later merge into what we call Anglo-Saxon. An historic King of
Sussex bears a Celtic name, but we read of him in the Latin, then in
the Teutonic tongues, and his realm, however feeble the proportion of
over-sea blood in it, bears an over-sea label for its court—“the South
Saxon.”
The mythical founder of Wessex bears a Celtic name, Cerdic: but we read
of him if not in Latin then in Anglo-Saxon. Not a _cantref_ but a
_hundred_ is the term of social organization in England when it is
re-civilized; not an _eglywys_ but a _church_ [Footnote: This word
“church” is a good example of what we mean by Teutonic dialect. It is
straight from the Mediterranean. The native German word for a temple—if
they had got so far as to have temples (for we know nothing of their
religion)—is lost.] is the name of the building in which the new
civilization hears Mass. The ruler, whatever his blood or the blood of
his subjects, is a _Cynning_, not a _Reg_ or a _Prins_. His house and
court are a _hall_ [Footnote: And “hall” is again a Roman word adopted
by the Germans.] not a _plâs_. We get our whole picture of renovated
Britain (after the Church is restored) colored by this half-German
speech. But the Britain we see thus colored is not barbaric. It is a
Christian Britain of mixed origin, of ancient municipalities cut off
for a time by the Pirate occupation of the South and East, but now
reunited with the one civilization whose root is in Rome.
This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel today that I must
emphasize and confirm it.