HOW BRITAIN BECAME ENGLAND
We might naturally expect to find that as soon as the conquering
Romans left our island, the native Brythons would rejoice in their
freedom and in getting rid of their masters. They had, indeed, made
an attempt, under their Queen Boadicea, to free themselves while the
legions still were there, but the attempt had failed. The good
discipline and fighting qualities of the Romans had been too much for
them.
So, for a short while after the Roman soldiers went, they may have
rejoiced in their freedom; but they did not rejoice long. You
remember those walls that the Romans built across the island, and
what their purpose was. It was to help keep out the Picts and
Caledonians, those wild tribes that lived in what we call the
Highlands of Scotland. We should regard these walls, not as
insurmountable barriers, but merely as aids to defence, connecting
camps and forts established at intervals along them. And within a
very short time of the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, or guards,
the Picts were over the wall and constantly harrying and robbing and
killing the Britons.
Now the story goes that the Britons, worn by the perpetual inroads of
the Northerners, invited to their assistance certain princes of the
Saxon people--the people, you will remember, who lived in Sleswig.
There were Jutes in the North of that country--in Jutland--then
Angli, as the Romans called them, {39} that is English, in the
middle, and Saxons in the south. But both Angli and Saxons were
names used to cover all those people. The names were used rather
inexactly.
[Sidenote: The Anglo-Saxons]
These Anglo-Saxons--let us call them so, for that will include both
the covering names--were great sea-farers, rovers, pirates. They
went on marauding expeditions in their ships just as the
Phœnicians had gone marauding long before and just as the
Northmen, the Vikings, went a little later. It may be they were
invited by the Britons; it may be they came without invitation, as
their pirate fleet went down along the east coast of Britain. If
they were invited, the result was very much like the result of the
invitation which we saw that the Count of Africa gave to the Vandals.
The Vandals came and helped him; but then they helped themselves also
so liberally that they drove him out of his own possessions. The
Anglo-Saxons did just the same by the Britons. They helped them:
they drove back the Caledonians: but then they stayed: they drove out
the Britons: they established themselves in the island: they changed
Britain, the land of the Britons, into England, the land of the
Angles.
At least, they made that change over much of the island. We have
noted its geography in an earlier chapter, and saw that the east and
the south are less mountainous and therefore less strong for defence
against an invader, than the west and north. So it was all down the
East of England and along the southern part that the Anglo-Saxons
settled. The Britons went back into the hills of Devon and Cornwall,
of Wales and of Cumberland.
We have to picture to ourselves all the eastern and southern shores
of Britain and the western coast of the Continent of Europe as very
liable to the attack of one or other of the sea-rovers at this time,
and, as a consequence of different tribes of these rovers arriving
{40} in strength in different parts of our island, we find it divided
into three different main kingdoms--in the north the kingdom of
Northumbria, which reached up as far as the Firth of Forth; in the
south the kingdom of Wessex, or the West Saxons; and between the two
the kingdom of Marcia, or Mercia, which meant, originally, the
kingdom of the Marches--of the "mark" or boundary between the English
and the Britons.
The Briton had become Romanised--that is to say had adopted Roman
ways of thought and living, and had lived under Roman law, while the
legions were there. Of course, since the legions formed permanent
encampments--practically towns--as we have seen, all the Romans and
the Roman influence did not leave when the soldiers and the
governors, appointed by Rome, went. The Britons had the Roman way of
talking of these English as "barbarians"--men outside the pale.
Then these barbarians came in, just as they had come into Gaul, and
conquered. But, for reasons that are not easily seen, they treated
the conquered people, the Britons, with far more severity than the
Continental conquerors showed. Perhaps they were of a fiercer race.
Whatever the reason, they came killing, exterminating the natives;
and, whereas in Gaul and other provinces that the Germans conquered,
the Roman methods of law and all the Roman customs were allowed to go
on, in Britain the Anglo-Saxons did away with all the Roman
institutions and manners. They brought in their own ways and their
own religion.
They were pagans, and the native Britons had become Christian.
Perhaps that, in part, is why they treated the Britons so badly. But
we have to be on our guard about believing quite all that is told us
of their cruelty; because the only people who have told us about it,
who wrote the history of the time {41} and of the doings of the
conquerors, were clerics, clerks of the holy orders, monks of a
Christian monastery.
[Sidenote: Druids]
Britain had been Christian, because the Romans had introduced
Christianity and established it in the stead of the old Druid
religion of which the great stone circle at Stonehenge remains as a
monument. But England was now pagan, and followed the religion of
the North, whose gods were Woden, or Odin, the god of battles, who
gives us our name for one of the days of the week--Woden's day, or
Wednesday, and Thor, the god of the hammer, the great smith, like
Vulcan in the religion which the Romans took from Greece. From Thor
we get our Thursday. And Freia, the goddess who was supposed to be
the wife of Odin, gives us our Friday. Tuesday is the day of the god
Tiw.
[Illustration: STONEHENGE. The Druidical circle, from the air, at
the present day. _R. R. Edwards. Salisbury._]
By way of completing the story of our weekdays--Sunday, of course, is
the day of the Sun; Monday, of the Moon. And Saturday--and you {42}
should note this, because it shows what a mixture our language is of
words taken from the Saxon on the one side and from the Latin, the
Roman, on the other--Saturday is the day of Saturn, one of the Roman
gods adopted from the Greek.
For more than a century England remained pagan. It was not till very
nearly A.D. 600 that any attempt was made to bring in Christianity
again. That attempt was made in the south-eastern corner of England,
just where the Anglo-Saxon pagans themselves had landed, and quite
near our present chief cathedral town of Canterbury. But the revival
of Christianity in England did not really come that way. The
northern kingdoms in England were too strong for any influence from
the southern kingdom to prevail, Christianity was reintroduced into
England from Ireland, whither the Saxons had never come to destroy
it. It came by way of an island, Iona, off the west coast of
Scotland, and so across to the Holy Island, off the coast of
Northumberland.
Then arose great fighting between the heathen, under Penda, King of
Mercia and of the "Middle English," as you will read of their being
called, and Christians under Oswi, King of Northumbria. Oswi utterly
defeated Penda in A.D. 655 and from that victory followed the
establishment of Christianity as the accepted religion over the
British islands.
All this story of England under the rule of the Anglo-Saxons is
separate and quite apart, for very many years, from the rest of the
great story, which is, at this time, chiefly concerned with the
destruction by the barbarians of the Western Roman Empire. It will
come very closely into the great story again before many centuries
are past, and you will see that it is closely involved in it by the
time we reach the end of this volume; but until 600 or so, England is
rather out of the main current of European history.
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