The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN

A.D. 449-579

JOHN R. GREEN

CHARLES KNIGHT

If we look for the fatherland of the English race, we must, as modern historians have clearly shown, direct our search "far away from England herself." In the fifth century of the Christian era a region in what is now called Schleswig was known by the name of Anglen (England). But the inhabitants of this district are believed to have comprised only a small detached portion of the Engle (English), while the great body of this people probably dwelt within the limits of the present Oldenburg and lower Hanover.

On several sides of Anglen were the homes of various tribes of Saxons and Jutes, and these peoples were all kindred, being members of one branch (Low German) of the Teutonic family. History first finds them becoming united through community of blood, of language, institutions, and customs, although it was too early yet to justify the historian in giving to them the inclusive name of Englishmen. They all, however, had part in the conquest of England, and it was their union in that land that gave birth to the English people.

Little is known of the actual character and life of these people who made the earliest England, but their Germanic inheritance is traceable in their social and political framework, which already prefigured the national organization that through centuries of gradual development became modern England.

Out of their early modes grew the forms of English citizenship and legislation, and the individual and public freedom which has slowly broadened down from generation to generation. Later came the modifying, if not transforming, influence of Christianity, replacing the ancient nature-worship which they took with them to their new home. On these foundations the English race, as it has grown up in the land they made their own, and in other lands to which like men and institutions have been carried, has reared its various structures of nationality.

JOHN R. GREEN

Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the empire, and they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; before the close of the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet. This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world; and a century after Cæsar's landing the emperor Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway, and the Roman frontier had been carried to the firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work of civilization followed fast on the work of the sword. To the last indeed the distance of the island from the seat of empire left her less Romanized than any other province of the west. The bulk of the population scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilisation rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the island to the other, manners, language, political life, all were of Rome.

For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports among which London held the first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But evils which sapped the strength of the whole empire told at last, on the province of Britain.

Wealth and population alike declined under a crushing system of taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry, under a despotism which crushed out all local independence. And with decay within came danger from without. For centuries past the Roman frontier had held back the Barbaric world beyond it—the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands.