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A
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
BY
CHARLES OMAN,
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS' COLLEGE,
AND DEPUTY-PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD;
AUTHOR OF
"WARWICK THE KINGMAKER;" "ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY;
"A HISTORY OF GREECE;" "THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES;"
"THE HISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR," ETC.
ELEVENTH EDITION.
LONDON:
EDWARD ARNOLD.
1904.
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
PREFACE
When adding one more to the numerous histories of England which have appeared of late years, the author feels that he must justify his conduct. Ten years of teaching in the Honour School of Modern History in the University of Oxford have convinced him that there may still be room for a single-volume history of moderate compass, which neither cramps the earlier annals of our island into a few pages, nor expands the last two centuries into unmanageable bulk. He trusts that his book may be useful to the higher forms of schools, and for the pass examinations of the Universities. The kindly reception which his History of Greece has met both here and in America, leads him to hope that a volume constructed on the same scale and the same lines may be not less fortunate.
He has to explain one or two points which may lead to criticism. In Old-English names he has followed the correct and original forms, save in some few cases, such as Edward and Alfred, where a close adherence to correctness might savour of pedantry. He wishes the maps to be taken, not as superseding the use of an atlas, but as giving boundaries, local details, and sites in which many atlases will be found wanting.
Finally, he has to give his best thanks to friends who were good enough to correct certain sections of the book—especially to Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls' College, Mr. C. H. Turner of Magdalen College, and Mr. F. Haverfield of Christ Church. But most of all does he owe gratitude to the indefatigable compiler of the Index, whose hands made a burden into a pleasure.
Oxford,
January 25, 1895.
PREFACE TO THE NINTH EDITION.
The fact that this book has passed through nine editions in seven years seems to show that it was not altogether written in vain, and has answered the purpose for which it was written.
The first edition carried the history of Great Britain to the year 1885. I have now prolonged it to the year 1902. The termination of the long reign of Queen Victoria, the end of the century, and the long-delayed pacification of South Africa, appeared to provide landmarks to which the narrative ought to be extended.
I have to thank many kind correspondents for corrections and suggestions made during the last seven years. They will note that their hints have not been neglected. A special word of thanks is due to the Rev. A. Beaven of Leamington, for a very copious and useful list of corrigenda, of which I have made full use.
Oxford,
September 15, 1902.
CONTENTS.
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | Celtic and Roman Britain | [1] |
| II. | The Coming of the English | [14] |
| III. | The Conversion of England, and the Rise of Wessex. 597-836 | [23] |
| IV. | The Danish Invasions, and the Great Kings of Wessex, 836-975 | [33] |
| V. | The Days of Cnut and Edward the Confessor | [51] |
| VI. | The Norman Conquest, 1066-1087 | [67] |
| VII. | William the Red—Henry I.—Stephen. 1087-1154 | [81] |
| VIII. | Henry II. 1154-1189 | [97] |
| IX. | Richard I. and John. 1189-1216 | [114] |
| X. | Henry III. 1216-1272 | [134] |
| XI. | Edward I. 1272-1307 | [148] |
| XII. | Edward II. 1307-1327 | [171] |
| XIII. | Edward III. 1327-1377 | [180] |
| XIV. | Richard II. 1377-1399 | [202] |
| XV. | Henry IV. 1399-1413 | [213] |
| XVI. | Henry V. 1413-1422 | [220] |
| XVII. | The Loss of France. 1422-1453 | [231] |
| XVIII. | The Wars of the Roses. 1454-1471 | [245] |
| XIX. | The Fall of the House of York. 1471-1485 | [260] |
| XX. | Henry VII. 1485-1509 | [272] |
| XXI. | Henry VIII., and the Breach with Rome. 1509-1536 | [282] |
| XXII. | The English Reformation. 1536-1553 | [296] |
| XXIII. | The Catholic Reaction. 1553-1558 | [314] |
| XXIV. | Elizabeth. 1558-1603 | [322] |
| XXV. | James I. 1603-1625 | [350] |
| XXVI. | The Reign of Charles I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War. 1625-1642 | [362] |
| XXVII. | The Great Civil War. 1642-1651 | [380] |
| XXVIII. | Cromwell. 1651-1660 | [406] |
| XXIX. | Charles II. 1660-1685 | [420] |
| XXX. | James II. 1685-1688 | [436] |
| XXXI. | England after the Revolution. 1688-1702 | [445] |
| XXXII. | Anne. 1702-1714 | [461] |
| XXXIII. | The Rule of the Whigs. 1714-1739 | [482] |
| XXXIV. | The Development of the Colonial Empire of Britain. 1739-1760 | [498] |
| XXXV. | George III. and the Whigs—The American War. 1760-1783 | [532] |
| XXXVI. | The Younger Pitt, and the Recovery of English Prosperity. 1782-1793 | [554] |
| XXXVII. | England and the French Revolution. 1789-1802 | [574] |
| XXXVIII. | England and Bonaparte. 1802-1815 | [598] |
| XXXIX. | Reaction and Reform. 1815-1832 | [633] |
| XL. | Chartism and the Corn Laws. 1832-1852 | [652] |
| XLI. | The Days of Palmerston. 1852-1865 | [673] |
| XLII. | Democracy and Imperialism. 1865-1885 | [700] |
| XLIII. | The Last Years of Queen Victoria, 1886-1901—The South African War. 1899-1902 | [718] |
| XLIV. | India and the Colonies. 1815-1902 | [734] |
| Index | [757] |
MAPS AND PLANS.
| PAGE | |
| The Gaelic and British Tribes in Britain | [3] |
| Roman Britain | [10] |
| England in the Year 570 | [18] |
| England in the Eighth Century | [30] |
| England in the Year 900 | [41] |
| France in the Reign of Henry II. | [98] |
| The Battle of Lewes | [142] |
| The Battle of Evesham | [145] |
| Wales in 1282 | [154] |
| The Battle of Bannockburn | [174] |
| The Battle of Crécy | [188] |
| The Battle of Poictiers | [191] |
| France after the Treaty of Bretigny | [194] |
| The Battle of Agincourt | [223] |
| The Battle of Edgehill | [384] |
| England at the End of 1643 | [388] |
| The Battle of Marston Moor | [390] |
| The Battle of Naseby | [394] |
| The Spanish Netherlands, 1702 | [466] |
| The Battle of Blenheim | [467] |
| Scotland in the Eighteenth Century | [506] |
| England and France in America, 1756 | [521] |
| The Battle of Quebec | [527] |
| India in the Time of Warren Hastings | [570] |
| Spain and Portugal, 1803-1814 | [616] |
| Europe in 1811-1812 | [620] |
| The Battle of Waterloo | [629] |
| Sebastopol, 1854 | [686] |
| Theatre of the South African War of 1899-1902 | [730] |
| India, 1815-1890 | [736] |
GENEALOGICAL TABLES.
| PAGE | |
| The House of Ecgbert | [66] |
| The House of William the Conqueror | [80] |
| The Scottish Succession, 1292 | [160] |
| The French Succession, 1337 | [184] |
| The Descendants of Edward III. | [201] |
| The Kin of Charles V. | [286] |
| The Spanish Succession, 1699 | [457] |
| The House of Stuart | [481] |
| The House of Hanover | [497] |
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
CELTIC AND ROMAN BRITAIN
In the dim dawn of history our island was a land of wood and marsh, broken here and there by patches of open ground, and pierced by occasional track-ways, which threaded the forest and circled round the edges of the impassable fen. The inhabited districts of the country were not the fertile river-bottoms where population grew thick in after-days; these were in primitive times nothing but sedgy water-meadows or matted thickets. Men dwelt rather on the thinly wooded upland, where, if the soil was poor, it was at any rate free from the tangled undergrowth that covered the valleys. It was on the chalk ridges of Kent or Wilts, or the moorland hills of Yorkshire or Cornwall, rather than on the brink of the Thames or Severn, that the British tribes clustered thick. Down by the rivers there were but small settlements of hunters and fishers perched on some knoll that rose above the brake and the rushes.
The earliest explorers from the south, who described the inhabitants of Britain, seem to have noticed little difference between one wild tribe and another. But as a matter of fact the islanders were divided into two or perhaps three distinct races, who had passed westward into our island at very different dates. First had come a short dark people, who knew not the use of metals, and wielded weapons of flint and bone. They were in the lowest grade of savagery, had not even learnt to till the soil, and lived by fishing and hunting. They dwelt in rude huts, or even in the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the wolf.
The Celts, Gael, and Britons.
Long after these primitive settlers, the first wave of the Celts, seven or eight centuries before Christ, came flooding all over Western Europe, and drove the earlier races into nooks and corners of the earth. They crossed over into Britain after overrunning the lands on the other side of the Channel, and gradually conquered the whole island, as well as its neighbour, Erin. The Celts came in two waves; the first, composed of the people who were called Gael, seem to have appeared many generations before the second, who bore the name of Britons.
The Gael are the ancestors of the people of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, while the Britons occupied the greater part of England and Wales, and are the progenitors of the Welsh of to-day. The old savage race who held the islands before the Celts appeared, were partly exterminated and partly absorbed by the new-comers. The Celts on the eastern side of the island remained unmixed with their predecessors; but into the mountainous districts of the west they penetrated in less numbers, and there the ancient inhabitants were not slain off, but became the serfs of their conquerors. Thus the eastern shore of Britain became a purely Celtic land; but in the districts along the shore of the Irish Sea, where the Gael bore rule, the blood of the earlier race remained, and the population was largely non-Celtic. There are to this day regions where the survival of the ancient inhabitants can be traced by the preponderance of short stature and dark hair among the inhabitants. Many such are to be found both in South Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. The Gael, therefore, were of much less pure blood than the later-coming Britons.
The Britons and their Gaelic kinsmen, though far above the degraded tribes whom they had supplanted, still showed many signs of savagery. They practised horrid rites of human sacrifice, in which they burnt captives alive to their gods, cramming them into huge images of wicker-work. But the barbarous practice which most astonished the ancient world was their custom of marking themselves with bright blue patterns painted with the dye of woad, and this led the Romans to give the northern tribes, who retained the custom longest, the name of the Picti, or "painted men."
GAEL AND BRITON.
The Celts were a tall, robust, fair-haired race, who had reached a certain stage of civilization. They tilled the fields and sailed the seas, but their chief wealth consisted in great herds of cattle, which they pastured in the forest-clearings which then constituted inhabited Britain. They wore armour of bronze, and used brazen weapons, to which in a later time they added iron weapons also. They delighted to adorn their persons with "torques" or necklaces of twisted gold. Their chiefs went out to war in chariots drawn by small shaggy horses, but alighted, like the ancient Greeks of the Heroic Age, when the hand-to-hand fighting began.
Like all Celtic tribes in all ages, the Britons and the Gael showed small capacity for union. They dwelt apart in many separate tribes, though sometimes a great and warlike chief would compel one or two of his neighbours to do him homage. But such kingdoms usually fell to pieces at the death of the warrior who had built them up. After the kings and chiefs, the most important class among the Celts was that of the Druids, a caste of priests and soothsayers, who possessed great influence over the people. They it was who kept up the barbarous sacrifices which we have already mentioned. Although tribal wars were incessant, yet the Britons had learnt some of the arts of peace, and traded with each other and with the Celts across the Channel. For the tin of Cornwall it would seem that they made barter with the adventurous traders who pushed their way across Gaul from the distant Mediterranean to buy that metal, which was very rare in the ancient world. The Britons used money of gold and of tin, on which they stamped a barbarous copy of the devices on the coins of Philip, the great King of Macedonia, whose gold pieces found their way in the course of trade even to the shores of the Channel. The fact that they had discovered the advantages of a coinage proves sufficiently that they were no longer mere savages.
Invasion of Julius Cæsar.
We have no materials for constructing a history of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Britain till the middle of the first century before Christ, when the great Roman conqueror, Julius Cæsar, who had just subdued northern Gaul, determined to cross the straits and invade Britain. He wished to strike terror into its inhabitants, for the tribes south of the Thames were closely connected with their kinsmen on the other side of the Channel, and he suspected them of stirring up trouble among the Gauls. Cæsar took over two legions and disembarked near Romney (B.C. 55). The natives thronged down to the shore to oppose him, but his veterans plunged into the shallows, fought their way to land, and beat the Britons back into the interior. He found, however, that the land would not be an easy conquest, for all the tribes of the south turned out in arms against him. Therefore he took his legions back to Gaul as the autumn drew on, vowing to return in the next year.
In B.C. 54 he brought over an army twice as large as his first expedition, and boldly pushed into the interior. Cassivelaunus, the greatest chief of eastern Britain, roused a confederacy of tribes against him; but Cæsar forced the passage of the Thames, and burnt the great stockaded village in the woods beyond that river, where his enemy dwelt. Many of the neighbouring princes then did him homage; but troubles in Gaul called him home again, and he left the island, taking with him naught save a few hostages and a vague promise of tribute and submission from the kings of Kent.
Commerce with Europe.
Nearly a hundred years passed before Britain was to see another Roman army. The successors of Julius Cæsar left the island to itself, and it was only by peaceful commerce with the provinces of Gaul that the Britons learnt to know of the great empire that had come to be their neighbour. But there grew up a considerable intercourse between Britain and the continent: the Roman traders came over to sell the luxuries of the South to the islanders, and British kings more than once visited Rome to implore the aid of the emperor against their domestic enemies.
Invasion of Claudius, A.D. 43.
But such aid was not granted, and the island, though perceptibly influenced by Roman civilization, was for long years not touched by the Roman sword. At last, in A.D. 43, Claudius Cæsar resolved to subdue the Britons. The island was in its usual state of disorder, after the death of a great king named Cunobelinus—Shakespeare's "Cymbeline"—who had held down south-eastern Britain in comparative quiet and prosperity for many years. Some of the chiefs who fared ill in the civil wars asked Claudius to restore them, and he resolved to make their petition an excuse for conquering the island. Accordingly his general, Aulus Plautius, crossed the Channel, and overran Kent and the neighbouring districts in a few weeks. So easy was the conquest that the unwarlike emperor himself ventured over to Britain, and saw his armies cross the Thames, and occupy Camulodunum (Colchester), which had been the capital of King Cymbeline, and now was made a Roman colony, and re-named after Claudius himself.
South-eastern Britain subdued.
The emperor returned to Rome after sixteen days spent in the island, there to build himself a memorial arch, and to celebrate a triumph in full form for the conquest of Britain. Aulus Plautius remained behind with four legions, and completed the subjection of the lands which lie between the Wash and Southampton Water, and thus formed the first Roman province in the island. There does not seem to have been very much serious fighting required to reduce the tribes of south-eastern Britain; the conquerors consented to accept as their vassals those chiefs who chose to do homage, and only used their arms against such tribes as refused to acknowledge the emperor's suzerainty.
Rebellion of Boadicea.
Under successive governors the size of the province of Britain continued to grow, till in the reign of Nero it had advanced up to the line of the Severn and Humber, and included all the central and southern counties of modern England. But the wild tribes of the Welsh mountains and the Yorkshire moors opposed a determined resistance to the conquerors, and did not yield till a much later date. While the governor Suetonius Paulinus was engaged in a campaign on the Menai Straits, against the tribe of the Ordovices, there burst out behind him the celebrated rebellion of Queen Boudicca (Boadicea). This rising began among the Iceni, the tribe who dwelt in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk. They had long been governed by a vassal king; but when he died sonless, the Romans annexed his dominions and cruelly ill-treated his widow Boudicca and her daughters. Bleeding from the Roman rods, the indignant queen called her tribesmen to arms, and massacred all the Romans within her reach. All the tribes of eastern Britain rose to aid her, and the rebels cut to pieces the Ninth Legion, and sacked the three towns of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum, [1] slaying, it is said, as many as 70,000 persons in their wild cruelty. But presently the governor Paulinus returned from his campaign in Wales at the head of his army, and in a great battle defeated and destroyed the British hordes. Boudicca, who had led them to the field in person, slew herself when she saw the battle lost (A.D. 61).
Agricola Governor of Britain, A.D. 78-85.
Southern Britain never rose again, but the Romans had great trouble in conquering the Silurians and Ordovices of Wales, and the Brigantes beyond the Humber. They were finally subdued by the great general Agricola, who governed the British province from 78 to 85. This good man was the father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, who wrote his life—a document from which great part of our knowledge of Roman Britain is derived. After conquering North-Wales and Yorkshire, Agricola marched northward against the Gaelic tribes of Scotland. He overran the Lowlands, and then pushed forward into the hills of the Highlands. At a spot called the Graupian Mountain (Mons Graupius) somewhere in Perthshire, he defeated the Caledonians, the fierce race who dwelt beyond the Forth and Clyde, with great slaughter. It was his purpose to conquer the whole island to its northernmost cape, and even to subdue the neighbouring Gaels of Ireland. But ere his task was complete the cruel and suspicious emperor Domitian called him home, because he envied and feared his military talents.
The province of Britain remained very much as Agricola had left it, stopping short at the Forth, and leaving the Scottish Highlands outside the Roman pale. It was held down by three Roman legions, each of whom watched one of the three most unruly of the British tribes; one at Eboracum (York) curbed the Brigantes; a second at Deva (Chester) observed the Ordovices; and a third at Isca (Caerleon-on-Usk) was responsible for the good behaviour of the Silurians.
Agricola did much to make the Roman rule more palatable to the Britons by his wise ordinances for the government of the province. He tried to persuade the Celtic chiefs to learn Latin, and to take to civilized ways of life, as their kinsmen in Gaul had done. He kept the land so safe and well guarded that thousands of settlers from the continent came to dwell in its towns. His efforts won much success, and for the future, southern Britain was a very quiet province.
The Wall of Hadrian.
But the Caledonians to the north retained their independence, and often raided into the Lowlands, while the Brigantes of Yorkshire still kept rising in rebellion, and once in the reign of Hadrian massacred the whole legion that garrisoned York. It was perhaps this disaster that drew Hadrian himself to Britain in the course of his never-ending travels. The emperor journeyed across the isle, and resolved to fix the Roman boundary on a line traced across the Northumbrian moors from Carlisle to Newcastle. There was erected the celebrated "Wall of Hadrian," a solid stone wall drawn in front of the boundary-ditch that marked the old frontier, and furnished with forts at convenient intervals. This enormous work, eighty miles long, reached from sea to sea, and was garrisoned by a number of "auxiliary cohorts," or regiments drawn from the subject tribes of the empire—Moors, Spaniards, Thracians, and many more—for the Romans did not trust British troops to hold the frontier against their own untamed kinsmen. The legion at York remained behind to support the garrison of the wall in case of necessity.
The Wall of Antoninus.
A few years later the continued trouble which the northern parts of Britain suffered from the raids of the Caledonians, caused the governors of the province to build another wall in advance of that of Hadrian. This outer line of defence, a less solid work than that which ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, was composed of a trench, and an earthern wall of sods, drawn from the mouth of the Forth to the mouth of the Clyde, at the narrowest part of the island. It is generally called the Wall of Antoninus, from the name of the emperor who was reigning when it was erected.
Campaign of Severus in Caledonia.
Only once more did the Romans make any endeavour to complete the subjection of Britain by adding the Gaelic tribes of the Scottish Highlands to the list of their tributaries. In 208-9-10 the warlike emperor Severus led the legions north of the Wall of Antoninus, and set to work to tame the Caledonians by felling their forests, building roads across their hills, and erecting forts among them. He overran the land beyond the Firth of Forth, and might perchance have ended by conquering the whole island, but he died of disease at York early in 211. His successors drew back, abandoned his conquests, and never attempted again to subjugate the Caledonians.
Roman civilization in Britain.
Altogether the Romans abode in Britain for three hundred and sixty years (A.D. 43 to A.D. 410). Their occupation of the land was mainly a military one, and they never succeeded in teaching the mass of the natives to abandon their Celtic tongue, or to take up Roman customs and habits. The towns indeed were Romanized, and great military centres like Eboracum and Deva, or commercial centres like London, were filled with a Latin-speaking population, and boasted of fine temples, baths, and public buildings. But the villagers of the open country, and the Celtic landholders who dwelt among them, were very little influenced by the civilization of the town-dwellers, and lived on by themselves much in the way of their ancestors, worshipping the same Celtic gods, using the same rude tools and vessels, and dwelling in the same low clay huts, though the townsmen were accustomed to build stone houses after the Roman fashion, to employ all manner of foreign luxuries, and to translate into Minerva, or Apollo, or Mars, the names of their old Celtic deities Sul, or Mabon, or Belucatadrus.
ROMAN BRITAIN
Showing the
CHIEF ROMAN ROADS.
The Romans greatly changed the face of Britain by their great engineering works. They drew broad roads from place to place, seldom turning aside to avoid forest or river. Their solidly-built causeways were carried across the marshy tracts, and pierced through the midst of the densest woods. Where the road went, clearings on each side were made, and population sprang up in what had hitherto been trackless wilderness. The Romans explored the remotest corners of Wales and Cornwall in their search after mineral wealth; they worked many tin, lead, and copper mines in the island, and exported the ores to Gaul and Italy. They developed the fisheries of Britain, especially the oyster fishery; not only did they prize British pearls, but the oysters themselves were exported as a special luxury to the distant capital of the world. They improved the farming of the open country so much that in years of scarcity the corn of Britain fed northern Gaul. In the more pleasant corners of the land Roman officials or wealthy merchants built themselves fine villas, with floors of mosaic, and elaborate heating-apparatus to guard them against the cold of the northern winter. Hundreds of such abodes are to be found: they clustered especially thick along the south coast and in the vale of Gloucester.
Gauls, Italians, Greeks, and Orientals came to share in the trade of Britain, and at the same time many of its natives must have crossed to the continent, notably those who were sent to serve in the auxiliary cohorts of Britons, which formed part of the Roman army, and were quartered on the Rhine and Danube. But in spite of all this intercourse, the Celts did not become Romanized like the Gauls or Spaniards; the survival of their native tongue to this day sufficiently proves it. In all the other provinces of the West, Latin completely extinguished the old native languages. In the towns, however, the Britons often took Roman names, and men of note in the countryside did the same. Many of the commonest Welsh names of to-day are corrupt forms of Latin names: Owen, for example, is a degradation from Eugenius, and Rhys from Ambrosius, though they have lost so entirely the shape of their ancient originals.
Britain harassed by barbarians.
Britain shared with the other provinces in the disasters which fell upon the empire in the third century, in the days of the weak usurpers who held the imperial throne after the extinction of the family of Severus. Three races are recorded as having troubled the land: the first was the ancient enemy, the Caledonians from beyond the wall, whom now the Chronicles generally style Picts, "the painted men," because they alone of the inhabitants of Britain still retained the barbarous habit of tattooing themselves. The second foe was the race of the Saxons, the German tribes who dwelt by the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. They were great marauders by sea, and so vexed the east of Britain by their descents that the emperors created an officer called "The Count of the Saxon Shore," [2] whose duty was to guard the coast from the Wash as far as Beachy Head by a chain of castles on the water's edge, and a flotilla of war-galleys. The third enemy was the Scottish race, a tribe who then occupied northern Ireland, and had not yet moved across to the land which now bears their name. They infested the shores of the province which lay between the Clyde and the Severn.
Carausius.
Attacked at once by Pict and Scot and Saxon, the province declined in prosperity, and gained little help from the continent where emperors were being made and remade at the rate of about one every three years. Britain seems to have first recovered herself in the time of Carausius, a "Count of the Saxon Shore," who proclaimed himself emperor, and reigned as an independent sovereign on our side of the Channel (287). His fleet drove off the Saxons, and his armies held back the Pict and Scot as long as he lived. But after a reign of seven years the rebel emperor was murdered, and three years later the province was reunited to the empire.
Constantius and Constantine.
For the next twenty years Britain was under the rule of the emperors Constantius and Constantine, both of whom dwelt much in the island, and paid attention to its needs. Constantius died at York, and his son, Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, went forth from Britain to conquer all the Roman world. But with the extinction of this great man's family in 362, evil days began once more. Barbarians were thronging round every frontier of the empire, greedy for the plunder of its great cities, while within were weak rulers, vexed by constant military rebellions. The Pict, the Scot, and the Saxon returned to Britain in greater force than before, and pushed their raids into the very heart of the province. Meanwhile, the soldiery who should have defended the island were constantly being drawn away by ambitious generals, who wished to use them in attempts to seize Italy, and win the imperial diadem. The ruin of Britain must be attributed to this cause more than to any other: twice the whole of its garrison was taken across the Channel by the rebellious governors, who had staked their all on the cast for empire. It was after the second of these rebels had failed, in 410, that the feeble Honorius, the legitimate emperor of the West, refused to send back any troops to guard the unprotected island, and bade the dismayed provincials do their best to defend themselves, because he was unable to give them any assistance.
Britain deserted by the Romans.
Britain therefore ceased to belong to the Roman empire, not because it wished to throw off the yoke, but because its masters declared that they could no longer protect it. Its inhabitants were by no means anxious to shift for themselves, and more than once they sent pathetic appeals to Rome to ask for aid against the savage Picts and Saxons. One of these appeals was written more than thirty years after Honorius abandoned the province. It was called "The Groans of the Britons," and ran thus: "The barbarians drive us into the sea, the sea drives us back on to the barbarians. Our only choice is whether we shall die by the sword or drown: for we have none to save us" (446).
In spite of these doleful complaints, Britain made a better fight against her invaders than did any other of the provinces which the Romans were constrained to abandon in the fifth century. But, unfortunately for themselves, the Britons were inspired by the usual Celtic spirit of disunion, and fell asunder into many states the moment that the hand of the master was removed. Sometimes they combined under a single leader, when the stress of invasion was unusually severe, but such leagues were precarious and temporary. The list of their princes shows that some of them were Romanized Britons, others pure Celts. By the side of names like Ambrosius, Constantine, Aurelius, Gerontius, Paternus, we have others like Vortigern, Cunedda, Maelgwn, and Kynan. Arthur, the legendary chief under whom the Britons are said to have turned back the Saxon invaders for a time, was—if he ever existed—the bearer of a Roman name, a corruption of Artorius. But Arthur's name and exploits are only found in romantic tales; the few historians of the time have no mention of him.
Christianity in Britain.
Celtic Britain, when the Romans abandoned it, had become a Christian country. Of the details of conversion of the land, we have only a few stories of doubtful authenticity; but we know that British bishops existed, and attended synods and councils on the continent, and that there were many churches scattered over the face of the land. The Britons were even beginning to send missionaries across the sea in the fifth century. St. Patrick, the apostle of the Irish Gael, was a native of the northern part of Roman Britain, who had been stolen as a slave by Scottish pirates, and returned after his release to preach the gospel to them, somewhere about the year 440. His name (Patricius) clearly shows that he was a Romanized Briton. A less happy product of the island was the heretical preacher Pelagius, whose doctrines spread far over all Western Europe, and roused the anger of the great African saint, Augustine of Hippo.
Here we must leave Celtic Britain, as the darkness of the fifth century closes over it. For a hundred and fifty years our knowledge of its history is most vague and fragmentary, and when next we see the island clearly, the larger half of it has passed into the hands of a new people, and is called England, and no longer Britain.