While such were the limited means of subsistence possessed by the inhabitants of the southern part of the island, it was still worse with those of the northern division. The tribes of the north, whom the earliest Roman historians comprised under the two classes of Maatæ, or inhabitants of the lowlands, and Caledonians, or those of the great forest and highlands, because they resisted to the last the degradation of Roman conquest, were longest deprived of the advantages of Roman civilization. We find them, therefore, so late as the invasion of Severus, in the same condition as the southern Britons had been at the time of Cæsar's arrival-or even lower in the scale-in consequence of the greater sterility of the soil, that offered fewer temptations to the civilizing exertions of husbandry. We are informed that they had neither walls nor towns, but were a pastoral people, living in tents; and that they subsisted on milk and wild fruits, and such animals as they caught in hunting. But to a people so imperfectly armed, their chief articles of game, which must have been the deer, the wild bull, and the boar, were not always attainable; and Xiphilinus, as we have already stated, informs us that the chief resource of these northern hunters in such a strait, was to swallow a certain drug, about the size of a bean, by which their spirits were exhilarated, and the cravings of hunger deadened. When milk and wild fruits failed, we are also told by the same writer, that those who dwelt in the woods had recourse to roots and leaves. Even worse modes of subsistence appear to have been adopted in cases of desperate famine; for, on the testimony of St. Jerome, they are charged with actual cannibalism. He declares that in his youth, when he was in Gaul, he saw people of the Attacotti, one of the northern tribes, devouring human flesh; and he even specifies those particular parts of the body which these man-devourers held in highest account. All this would be incredible, did we not know that the same practice even yet prevails among the islands of the South Seas, and in a part of Sumatra, where the people are at least as civilized as the rudest tribes of the Britons of the north, while they had not their plea of urgent necessity. Although little has been told us by the Roman writers of the form of government which was established in Britain, yet, from the fact of the people belonging to the Celtic race, we can easily conclude that it was the same patriarchal institution to which the Celts have invariably adhered, whatever might be the country in which they obtained a settlement. Politically, the Britons did not constitute a collective nation, but a congeries of tribes, each ruled by its own independent head. On this account, if the Belgae of the southern coast had been a united people, they might have anticipated the Saxon conquest, and obtained a complete predominance over the whole island. But, from Cæsar's account, it appears that these colonists still retained the names of the different peoples from whom they had sprung; and in all likelihood, therefore, were as much divided among themselves as were the rude tribes whom they dispossessed. Ptolemy, in his classification of the Britons, gives us not less than seventeen tribes for the south, and eighteen for the north part of the island, making thirty-five in all!-a comparatively easy conquest for Agricola, and afterwards for the successors of Hengist and Horsa. One wonders, indeed, that, from the difficulty of bringing so many independent and rival sovereigns together, they could in any case be united for a common resistance; but a common danger, which brings animals the most hostile to each other within a peaceful ring, until the danger is over-past, could combine several, or even the whole of the tribes against a dangerous foreign invasion, as was evinced in the one case by the army of Caractacus, and in the other by that of Cassivellaunus. But these unions were of such uncertain continuity that, when the tide of fortune turned, the one leader was betrayed and the other deserted. Of the amount of regal authority which these kings possessed over their subjects, and the specific manner in which it was exercised, the Roman historians have not informed us; all we can learn of this subject is, that the nobles or inferior chiefs had a controlling voice in every public movement; and that the authority of the Druids, when they were pleased to interpose it, was superior even to that of the sovereigns. They were the sacred Brahmins of Britain-the race who were sprung from the highest and holiest portion of that divine body, out of which all the other classes of society proceeded—and who, therefore, by virtue of their superior descent, could claim a paramount authority over both king and soldier. Here was a check upon the otherwise unlimited and irresponsible power of a Celtic chief, which was common to Britain alone-making the conclusion obvious, that the Druids had not originally been Celts, but strangers, of a higher and more civilized race, who had assumed the preeminence which knowledge unscrupulously exercised will always obtain over barbarism and ignorance. Of this Druidical supremacy, even in political matters, we are assured by Dio Chrysostom, who informs us that even a royal edict could not be carried into effect without the sanction of the Druids; and that the kings were nothing more than the servants and instruments of the priesthood. Such a divided state of society as thus existed in Britain, at once suggests the idea of incessant strife and contention. Each tribe was a nation an early civilization, that the Britons were not such utter savages as they have been represented; and that they must have had science, and skill, and long-descended experience among them, as well as brute force, and the labour of countless hands. It has been alleged, also, that with the Druids for their schoolmasters, they must have learned a more comfortable style of life, and attained a higher style of intellectual culture, than have been attributed to them in Cæsar's Commentaries. It is unfortunate that these Druids have passed away and left no historians to record their deeds, except those who were their enemies and destroyers. If either the records of the past of our island can be more clearly deciphered, or the buried treasures of its antiquarianisın more plentifully exhumed, it may be that we shall have a more favourable account of the Britons than can be found in Roman history. We may then also learn from what race and country the Druids came, at what time they arrived in Britain, what were their real qualifications and character; and whether such wattled, mud-built hovels as the Romans found at their arrival, had always stood in full neighbourhood with the stately erections of Stonehenge and Avebury. In itself; every king had a rival in his neighbour; thought, from these most substantial evidences of and where none of those obstacles interposed which keep hostile kingdoms apart, the wars of the Britons among each other must have been both rancorous and incessant. A boundary line, a pasture field, even a personal or family pique, would be enough, in the first instance, to set two tribes at variance, and afterwards to involve others in the contest. That such a state of internal warfare was common among the Britons, we may learn from the immense earthen ramparts that can still be traced in the island, of which that of Wansdyke is a specimen. As they seem to have extended for several miles, they were probably thrown up for the defence of a whole tribe against their neighbours - a sort of Chinese wall on a limited scale. The same state of insecurity is indicated by the remains of broad and deep covered ways, strongly embanked on either side, which served as lines of communication from one foresttown to another. Of these, the specimens that exist in Wiltshire attest not only the vast labour with which they were constructed, but the military skill and experience that had planned them. In warfare, indeed, the Britons showed that they were no tyros, by their resistance to Cæsar and his legions. This was evidently their chief department of knowledge, even as their war-chariots were the most ingenious of their fabrications. Strange, indeed, must have been the contrast between the miserable clusters of hovels in the heart of a wood, which constituted a British town -if we are to put faith in Roman authoritiesand the array of armed warriors, and prancing steeds, and rattling chariots, that poured from it through the long, broad, covered way, to attack some rival town! And where were the Druids, the while, to prevent such terrible collisions? Being men of like passions with their worshippers, perhaps they sympathized in the feud. Or perhaps they were cautious of interposing against such outbursts, from the fear that their own ascendency might be swept away in the popular storm. Such were the Britons at the period of the Roman invasion. The sketch is not only narrow, but imperfect, owing to the very scanty information on the subject which the Roman writers have bequeathed to us. A new school of British antiquarianism has also lately risen to assert, that this scantiness is not the greatest defect in their statements that they have been partial and onesided, as well as careless and brief, in their accounts of Britain and its inhabitants. While they saw and announced the barbarism of the people, why were they so silent about those Cyclopean erections with which the island abounded, and those relics of a higher civilization which the graves still continue to yield up? It has been Although the stay of Cæsar in Britain was so brief, and his two campaigns so indecisive of results, compared with his usual career of conquest, his visit was not without important consequences. It opened the island more completely to the knowledge of the world, and was attended with not only more frequent arrivals from Gaul, but even visits from Rome itself. The effect of such intercourse was that, even in the time of Augustus, the arts, the manners, and religion of Rome had obtained an entrance into the island. This we are told by Strabo, who also informs us of the increase of traffic that had already taken place in Britain; and while he mentions gold, silver, and iron, corn, dogs, cattle, and skins as its exports, the imports were ivory, bridles, gold chains, cups of amber, drinking glasses, and other similar articles. Then, too, the ring money of bronze and iron gave place to a regular coinage of the valn able metals, better fitted for foreign circulation; and of these, the mintage of Cunobelinus, usually stamped with a human effigy on the one side, and an animal or emblematic device on the other, gives ample indications of the commercial improvement that had taken place during the century which followed the invasion of Julius Cæsar. But that of Claudius succeeded, when the island was conquered and occupied as well as invaded, and when not only the style of British life and character, but the whole aspect of the country, were to assume a new physiognomy. These changes, introduced by the establishment of the Roman dominion, need only to be hastily glanced at, being of the same kind with those they impressed upon every conquered country, and the ineffaceable tokens of which are still distinctly marked over the whole map of Europe. The land of many tribes was reduced into a single province; and although native kings in some cases were allowed to retain their titles, it was only in subservience to the paramount rule of the Roman governor. Municipia or free towns were established, with the privileges of Roman citizenship; highways were constructed, that linked the scattered districts into a single country; and while Roman laws, courts of justice, temples, and academies took the place of Celtic legislation and Druidical training, the rich natural resources of the country-its lead, copper, and tin-its fertilizing marl and valuable chalk-its pearls, and even its oysters-its spirited horses, and fleet, stanch hunting-dogs-all were brought to their full perfection, introduced into the markets of Rome and the Continent, and converted into plentiful sources of commercial wealth, as well as motives to increased British immigration. It is in this way, perhaps, that we are to account for the discrepancies between the statements of Cæsar respecting the temporary forest villages of the Britons, and the numerous towns by which they were superseded in the days of Tacitus, 130 years afterwards. The energy and rapidity of Roman civilization, especially among a rude people, generally corresponded with the previous work of conquest. It was then, also, that the youths of Britain awoke as to a new life, and learned to despise the rude habits of their fathers: Roman dresses and ornaments were speedily adopted in lieu of sheep-skins or Gaulish tartan; and while VOL. 1. they attended the courts and theatres of the con querors, they did their best to imitate-and even to ape when they could not imitate-the fashions of Rome itself, and the refinements that had newly issued from the imperial palace. Such we could easily imagine to have been the case, without turning for confirmation to the turgid and lugubrious pages of Gildas, in which he describes the change, and bewails the vices that had followed it. It happened, unfortunately for the Britons, in this great transformation from their primitive state to the high artinicial style of their conquerors, that the progress was not a gradual one. Had it been so, it would have laid a firmer hold upon the native character, and produced more vital results. We might then have had British orators, poets, and historians of these early ages, whose works would have been worth reading, as well as warriors and statesmen, whom history would have been proud to commemorate. But the change was effected so rapidly, that it seemed little else than an external show; it was a gay, superficial varnishing, rather than an internal and thorough permeation; a few years would have dimmed it, and a single storm effaced it for ever. For only three centuries this gay show continued; and what a brief period for a national history!— and when the Roman fell, the Briton could stand no longer. A woful picture of this helplessness was presented in the inability of the Britons to defend themselves from such enemies as the Scots and Picts, and their calling in the Saxons to their aid. It was, indeed, full time that a new people should enter upon the scene-that fresh elements should be introduced for the construction of a new national character! 9 BOOK II. PERIOD FROM THE ARRIVAL OF THE SAXONS TO THE ARRI OF THE NORMANS.-617 YEARS. FROM A.D. 449-1066. CHAPTER I.-CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY. THE ARRIVAL OF THE SAXONS TO THE UNION OF THE HEPTARCHY.-A. D. 449--82 Origin of the Saxons-Their early history-Their arrival in Britain-Progress of their conquest of E Fabulous history of King Arthur-The Heptarchy-The office of Bretwalda-Reigns of the successi waldas-Introduction of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons-Wars of the Heptarchy-Reign of Egbert-England reduced into one kingdom. OME etymologists have derived | turies, is the basis and staple of the i the word Saxon from the term Seax, a short sword, with which the warlike natives of the shores of the Baltic, the Elbe, the Weser, and the Rhine, are supposed, but on somewhat doubtful authority, to have been generally armed. It is much more probable, however, that the Saxons are the Sakai-Suna, or descendants of the Sakai, or Sacæ, a tribe of Scythians, who are mentioned by ancient writers as making their way towards Europe from the East so early as in the age of Cyrus. Pliny tells of a branch of the Sacs who called themselves Sacassani; and Ptolemy designates another branch by the name Saxones, which seems to be merely another form of the same word. But whatever was the etymology of the name, it was certainly, at the time of the British invasion, applied, in a very general sense, to tribes or nations who were separate, and differing in some essentials, though they had most probably all sprung from the same stock at no very distant period, and still preserved the same physical features, the same manners and customs, and nearly, though not quite, the same unaltered lanwhich, at the distance of fourteen cen ve generations the tribes, or even portions of moved from place to place, as the necessities ances demanded; names may have appeared, Kogether from the scene; wars, seditions, conand fall of states, the solemn formation or dissoderacies, may have filled the ages that intervened st settlement of the Teutons in Germany, and their history as dangerous to the quiet of Rome. The speak. They were all of the pure Te heroic lays may possibly preserve some shadow Frisick dialect bears to the Anglo-Saxon, a recent writer conjectures that the conquerors of Britain must have come principally from Friesland.' But many known fluxes and refluxes of population took place between the fifth and the twelfth centuries; the Jutes and the Angles, whose language may have been as like that of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors as the old Frisick dialect, were partially dispossessed of their territory in the peninsula of or peninsula of Jutland (now a province of Denmark), and in parts of Schleswig and Holstein, the territory of the Angles extending as far as the modern town of Flensborg. In Holstein there is a district still called Anglen (the real Old England); and the narrowness of its limits need not interfere with our belief that this was the seat of the tribe (the Angles) that gave its name to our island. The Saxons proper, to the south of the Jutes and Angles, were far more widely spread, extending from the Weser to the delta of the Rhine, and occupying the countries now called Westphalia, Friesland, Holland, and probably a part of Belgium. Their precise limits are not fixed, but it seems their gradual encroachments on the Continent had brought them from the Baltic to the neighbourhood of the British Channel, when they embraced, as it were, our south-eastern coast. From the very close resemblance the old Jutland, and mixed up with newer tribes from Scandinavia, who eventually formed the Danish kingdom, and must have influenced the dialect there, as afterwards in Schleswig and Holstein. On the other hand, the occupants of the remarkable district of Friesland, where language, manners. usages-where all things seem, even in our days, to retain an ancient and primitive stamp, may, from local situation or other causes, have escaped the intermixture that befell the other Saxons. It is generally admitted that Horsa, Hengist, and their followers, were Jutes, and that the tribe or nation they first called in to partake in the pay and spoils of the Britons were their neighbours the Angles, from Holstein, and not the Saxons, from Friesland, though the latter soon joined the enterprise, and probably derived some advantage from being nearer than the others to the scene of action. When the conquests of the Romans, in the first century of our era, brought them into contact with the Saxons, they found them as brave as the Britons, but, like the latter people, unprovided with steel blades and the proper implements of war. During the three centuries, however, that had elapsed since then, in their wars with the Roman armies, and their friendly intercourse | with the Roman colonies in Gaul and on the Rhine, they had been made fully sensible of their wants, and learned, in part, how to supply them. In their long-continued piratical excursions they had looked out for bright arms and well-wrought steel, as the most valuable article of plunder, and a constant accumulation must have left them well provided with that ruder metal, which commands gold. When they appeared in Britain, they certainly showed no want of good arms. Every warrior had his dagger, his spear, his battle-axe, and his sword, all of steel. In addition to these weapons, they had bows and arrows, and their champions frequently wielded a ponderous club, bound and spiked with iron, a sort of sledgehammer, a copy, possibly, from the Scandinavian type of Thor's "mighty hammer." These two 1 Palgrave, Hist. Eng. |