The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest

by Thomas Hodgkin

ERRATA.

Page 332, line 12, for “Guthred” read “Guthfred”.

Page 333, line 3, for “North Wales” read “part of South Wales”.

CHAPTER I.
THE PREHISTORIC FOREWORLD.

The history of England if we wish to take it in its narrowest sense begins with the migrations of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons in the fifth century after Christ. Yet, remembering that we have dwelling close beside us and mingling their blood with ours a gallant little people who own no descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and remembering also how magical was the effect on all the barbarian races, of contact with the all-transmuting civilisation of Rome, we cannot surely leave altogether untold the story of those five centuries during which our country was known to the rest of Europe not as Anglia but as Britannia. Can we absolutely stop even there? It is true that the conscious history of Britain, the history that was written by chroniclers and enshrined in libraries, begins, as do the histories of all the nations of Western Europe, with the day when they came first in contact with the Genius of Rome. But is it possible to avoid trying to peer a little further into the infinite, dim and misty ages that lie beyond that great historic landmark? This is what our teachers of natural science have endeavoured to do on our behalf, labouring with the spade of the excavator and the collected specimens of the comparative anatomist to read a few of those faded pages of the history of Britain which had already been long illegible when Julius Cæsar landed on our shores.

And first we listen to the voice of Geology. After toiling through the all-but eternities of the Primary and Secondary systems of rock-formation, she seems to heave a sigh of relief as she enters the vestibule of the Tertiary system. New heavens and a new earth, an earth not utterly unlike that upon which we now dwell, seem to lie before her, and she names the four vast halls through which she leads her disciples “the Dawn of the New,” “the Less New,” “the More New,” and “the Most New” (Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene). In the last of these halls, which is represented by a mere line on the geological ground plan, yet which may easily have had a duration of 200,000 years, we at last find our fellow-countryman, the first human inhabitant, as far as we know, of the British Isles. In certain well-known caves on the south coast of Devonshire (Kent’s Cavern and Brixham) there were found some sixty years ago flint implements undoubtedly fashioned by human hands, along with the remains of hyenas and other animals long since extinct in the British Islands, and these were lying under a stalagmite floor which must have taken at least 12,000 years, and may well have taken 100,000 years, for its formation. It was thus conclusively proved that Palæolithic man whose handiwork has been found in many other European countries, especially in the wonderfully interesting caves of Aquitaine, lived also, how many millenniums ago none can say, in the limestone caves of Britain. Besides these dwellers in caves and probably of an even earlier period than they, were the other Palæolithic men who have left abundant traces of their presence in the spear-heads, flints, scrapers and other large stone implements which are often found in the gravel deposits of ancient rivers.

The Old Stone-workers, as this earliest known race of men is called to distinguish them from Neolithic men, their immeasurably remote descendants or representatives, knew, of course, nothing of the use of metals, and generally fashioned their flint implements or their bone needles in a somewhat rough and unworkmanlike manner. They knew nothing of the art of the weaver, and can therefore have had no other clothing than the skins of beasts. Neither did they ever manufacture anything in the nature of pottery; so that shells and the skulls of animals must have been their only drinking cups. But the relics of their primeval feasts show that they were in all probability not cannibals, and the very few Palæolithic skulls which have been preserved show a type decidedly nobler than some of the backward races of the present day. Curiously enough the men who had made so little advance in the homely industries of life had nevertheless a distinct feeling for graphic art. “By far the most noteworthy objects” in the Palæolithic caves “are the fragments of bone, horn, ivory and stone, which exhibit outlined and even shaded sketches of various animals. These engravings have been made with a sharp-pointed implement, and are often wonderfully characteristic representations of the creatures they portray. The figures are sometimes single; in other cases they are drawn in groups. We find representations of a fish, a seal, an ox, an ibex, the red-deer, the great Irish elk or deer, the bison, the horse, the cave-bear, the rein-deer and the mammoth or woolly elephant.”[1]

Whatever may have been the precise relation of the Pleistocene period to the Great Ice Age—a point as to which there is some difference of opinion—it is admitted that at some time or other after that when the hyena howled in the Brixham Cave, and when Palæolithic man left there his rudely worked flint implements, the conditions of life in Northern Europe changed. The Arctic zone invaded the larger part of the Temperate zone, and a great cap of ice covered not only the Scandinavian countries and the greater part of Russia but Ireland, Scotland and England, at least as far south as the valley of the Thames. Now were our chalk hills rounded into smoothness, now were many of our river beds hollowed out, and untidy heaps of “terminal moraine” deposited where the glaciers debouched into the valleys. This dismal change, destructive of all the higher organic life and continuing possibly over a period of thousands of years, makes, in our island at any rate, an impassable barrier between two races of mankind. When the great ice deluge subsided, when the winter-tyrant returned to his true Arctic home, when the oak and the pine began again to appear upon the hills, and flowers like our own bloomed in the valleys, then the Neolithic man, the “New Stone-worker,” came upon the scene and scattered abundant evidences of his presence over the land. From that period—date we cannot call it, for we have no evidence which would justify us in making the roughest approximation to a date—man has been continuously a dweller in this island, Neolithic man at length yielding ground to the immigrant Celt, the Celt to the Saxon, the Saxon to the Dane and the Norman.

At this point Ethnology must intervene and take up the story of the ages which has thus far been told by her sister Geology. Of what race were the men who after the retreat of the great desolating glaciers came to inhabit this our island? We know that on the one hand they were in a decidedly more advanced state of civilisation than their Palæolithic predecessors. Instead of the rough unshapely pyramids of flint which the Old Stone men used for axes and chisels, Neolithic man went on shaping and polishing his implements till scarcely a fault could be found in the symmetry of their curves. He continued, of course, to hunt and fish as his predecessor had done, but he had also some knowledge of agriculture, he was a breeder of cattle and he knew how to weave cloth and to bake pottery. He no longer lived principally in caves, but sometimes in a fairly constructed house, often, for security, built on the edge of a lake. But, strange to say, with all these great advances towards civilisation, he does not seem to have felt any of that passion for picture-drawing which distinguished his predecessor “the artistic hunter of the Reindeer period”.[2] The physiological characteristics which differentiate Neolithic man from the Celt, his conqueror, will be more fully dwelt on when we come to the next act in the drama; but meanwhile it may be stated that the race was not a tall one. Professor Rolleston says: “I have never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 9 inches in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the ‘stone and bone’ [i.e., Neolithic] period”. There is some reason to think that they were dark complexioned with black and curly hair, but it must be admitted that the evidence for this statement is not very conclusive.

On the whole Ethnology decides that these earliest inhabitants of our island after the Great Ice Age were a non-Aryan race, strangers therefore to that great and widely scattered family to which, as far as language is concerned, all the great European peoples save the Turks, the Hungarians and the Finns, ultimately belong. Of course since no vestige of language survives to indicate their nationality, even this universally accepted classification, or rather refusal to classify, must be considered as purely conjectural. In the words of Professor Rolleston: “The race which used stone and bone implements, may, so far as the naturalist’s investigations lead him, have spoken either a Turanian or an Aryan tongue: what he sees in their skulls and their surroundings impresses him with the notion of an antiquity which may have given time enough and to spare for the more or less complete disappearance of more than one unwritten language”. The important fact to lay hold of is that the whole of the long period of Stone-workers in this country is pre-Celtic. Any name which we may for purposes of convenience give to these aborigines of Britain, whether the now nearly discarded word Turanians, to mark their exclusion from the Aryan family; or Iberians, to indicate a possible connexion with the mysterious Basques of the Pyrenees; or Silurians, in order to show a possible survival of their type in the countrymen of Caractacus; is only like an algebraical symbol, a label affixed to a locked box, denoting our ignorance of its contents.

Perhaps the most important fact known in connexion with the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain is that recent discoveries show that they were the builders of Stonehenge. That a race of men using no implements of iron should have succeeded in rearing those huge blocks into position on the plain of Wiltshire is a stupendous marvel, equalling in its way the erection of the pyramids of Ghizeh, the placing of the great stones in the temple at Baalbek, or the superposition of the 300-ton block of Istrian marble on the tomb of Theodoric, at Ravenna. This discovery seems to throw some doubt on the generally received notion that Stonehenge was connected with Druidical worship, since that was probably of Celtic origin. It is possible that Stonehenge may be the “magnificent circular temple to Apollo” which, according to Diodorus Siculus, existed in an island which may be identified with Britain.

* * * * *

To the age of stone succeeded the age of bronze, and to the age of bronze succeeded that of iron. Both in our island belong to the domination of the Celts, except in so far as the age of iron may be said to have lasted through Roman, Saxon and Norman domination down to our own day. It is admitted by all that the Celtic immigrants came in two successive waves, the distinction between which may be seen to this day, or if not always seen in physical type, at least always heard in the language of their descendants. The first wave, which is generally known as the Gaelic, eventually rolled to the Highlands and islands of Scotland and to the shores of Ireland, and is represented philologically by the kindred dialects of Gaelic and Erse. The second wave, popularly known as the Cymric, overspread the whole east and centre of Britain, the Gaels being probably forced to retire before their Cymric conquerors. To this race belong the Welsh and the Bretons of France; and Cumberland and Cornwall once spoke their language. Some of our most recent authorities on British ethnology, believing the term Cymri to be of late origin and the term Gaelic to have some misleading associations, prefer to speak of Goidels and Brythons (early national names) instead of Gaels and Cymri; but the distinction between the two races and the main lines of their geographical distribution are generally accepted, and are not affected by this question of nomenclature.

It is probable, then, that at some period whose date cannot yet be even approximately conjectured, and from some quarter which we may guess, but can only guess, to have been the north of Germany, a bronze-using race of warriors and hunters, ancestors of the modern Highlander and Irishman, crossed the sea and established themselves in the island of Britain, or, as it was, perhaps, then called, Albion. Later on, but how many centuries later none can say, another race, kindred but probably hostile, invaded our shores, drove the Gaels or Goidels before them, established themselves in the best parts of the southern portion of the island, and, being themselves called Brythons, gave to the whole land the name by which the Romans called it, Britannia. As we know that iron had been introduced into the country before the arrival of the Romans, we may conjecture that this second Celtic wave consisted of the wielders of weapons of iron, and that this was one cause of their victory over the Goidels. The Brythons, thus settled in the valley of the Thames and above the chalk cliffs of Sussex, were the enemies whom Cæsar encountered when he invaded Britain.

A word may be said as to the relation of these Aryan invaders to the presumably non-Aryan aborigines, the Neolithic men to whom allusion was previously made. It used to be supposed that these aborigines disappeared before the men of bronze and iron as completely as the aborigines of Tasmania have disappeared before the Anglo-Saxon immigrant. More careful investigation has led our recent ethnologists to deny this conclusion. In the first place, there are features in the rude polity of the historic Celts which suggest a doubt whether they really constituted the whole population of the country. Their chiefs are warlike leaders, their rank and file are themselves owners of slaves. Everything about them seems to show that they were, like the Spartans, a comparatively small ruling race surrounded by a subject population, which they perhaps needed to keep severely in check. Then the testimony of the tombs—and it is after all to the tombs that we must chiefly resort for information as to the fate of these buried peoples—decidedly confirms the theory of the survival of the aborigines and of their blending to a considerable extent with their Celtic conquerors. The stone-using people buried their dead in oblong mounds technically known as “long barrows” generally some one hundred to two hundred feet long by forty or fifty feet wide. The skulls found in these long barrows, lying side by side with implements of stone, are uniformly of the type known as Dolicho-cephalic, that is, the width from ear to ear is very considerably less than the length from the eyes to the back of the head. With the introduction of bronze we at once find a noticeable difference both in the shape of the tomb and the appearance of its occupant. The mound is now circular, generally from forty to sixty feet in diameter, the “round barrow” of the archæologist; and the skulls found in it are at first uniformly of the Brachy-cephalic type, square and strong, the width generally about four-fifths of the length. The important point to observe for our present purpose is that as we pass from the early Celtic to the late Celtic type of barrow—a transition of which we are assured by the gradual introduction of iron as well as by other signs known to archæologists—the character of the skulls undergoes a certain modification towards the Dolicho-cephalic type. The conclusion arrived at by the greatest investigator of British barrows, Dr. Greenwell, is that “ultimately the two races became so mixed up and connected as to form one people. If this was the case, by a natural process the more numerous race would in the end absorb the other, until at length, with some exceptions to be accounted for by well-known laws, the whole population would become one, not only in the accidents of civilisation and government, but practically in blood also.”

CHAPTER II.
CÆSAR IN BRITAIN.

Down to the middle of the first century before Christ the British Isles were scarcely more known to the civilised nations of southern Europe than the North Pole is to the men of our own day. The trade which had probably long existed in the tin of Cornish mines had been purposely kept in mysterious darkness by the Phœnicians who profited thereby, so that Herodotus, the much inquiring, only mentions the Tin-islands (Cassiterides) to say that he knows naught concerning them. That trade had now probably become, save for the short passage of the channel, an overland one, and enriched the merchants of Marseilles. A citizen of that busy port, Pytheas by name, who seems to have been contemporary with Alexander the Great, professed to have travelled over the greater part of Britain, and afterwards to have sailed to a great distance along the northern coast of Germany. It was the fashion of later authors, such as Polybius and Strabo, to sneer at his alleged voyage of discovery and to doubt his veracity, but the tendency of modern inquiry is in some degree to restore the credit of this Marco Polo of pre-Christian times, to show that in some points he had a more correct knowledge of geography than his critics, and to deepen our regret that his work is known to us only in a few passages selected and perhaps distorted by his hostile reviewers. It must be admitted that if he reported that the circumference of Britain was 40,000 stadia (about 5,000 of our miles), and that he had traversed the whole of it on foot,[3] his statement was not altogether consistent with fact.

Such, however, was all the information that the Greeks and Romans possessed concerning our island near the middle of the first century B.C., at the time when Cicero was thundering against Catiline, and Pompey was forcing his way into the temple at Jerusalem. Her time, however, for entrance on the great theatre of the world was near at hand, and it was for her a fortunate circumstance, and one not inconsistent with the part which she has played thereon in later ages, that the man who brought her on to the stage should have been himself the central figure in the world’s political history—Gaius Julius Cæsar.

Sprung from one of the oldest and proudest families of Rome, yet nephew by marriage of the peasant-soldier Marius, Cæsar, the high-born democrat, possessed in his own person that combination of qualities which has ever been found most dangerous to the rule of a narrow and selfish oligarchy. The outworn machine which men still called the Roman republic was obviously creaking towards an utter breakdown, and must soon, if the provinces were not to be bled to death by greedy senators, be replaced by the government of a single man, whether that man were called king, or general, or dictator. The only question was who that single man should be. Cæsar felt that he was the man of destiny, foreordained to stand on that awful eminence. He flung out of the Roman forum and senate-house, teeming as they were with squalid intrigues and echoing to the cries of ignoble factions, and at the age of forty set himself to a ten years’ apprenticeship to empire on the banks of the Loire and the Saône, amid the vast forests of Britain or of Gaul. The French historian, Michelet, has finely said: “I would that I could have seen that pale countenance, aged before its time by the revelries of Rome: that delicate and epileptic man, walking at the head of his legions under the rains of Gaul, swimming across our rivers or riding on horseback among the litters in which his secretaries were carried, and dictating five or six letters at once: agitating Rome from the furthest corners of Belgium: sweeping two millions of men from his path and in the space of ten years subduing Gaul, the Rhine and the northern ocean”.

At the end of the first three years of Cæsar’s proconsulship (58–56 B.C.) having apparently almost completed the conquest of Gaul, he stood a conqueror on the southern shore of the Straits of Dover, looked across at the white cliffs of Albion, and dreamed of bringing that mysterious island within the circle of Roman dominion. Pretexts for invasion were never lacking to an adventurous proconsul. There were close ties of affinity between many of the northern tribes of Gaul and their British neighbours. Some tribes even bore the same name. The Atrebates of Arras were reflected in the Atrebates of Berkshire; there were Belgæ in Somerset and Wiltshire as well as in Belgium; even men call Parisii were found, strangely enough, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Then there was also the connexion, whatever may have been its value, between the religion of the continental and the insular Celts. Our information concerning the Druids (chiefly derived from Cæsar himself) is somewhat vague and unsatisfactory, but there is no reason to doubt his statement that the Druidic “discipline” had originated in Britain and had been carried thence into Gaul, and thus any religious element that there may have been in the resistance of the Gallic tribes to Roman domination would look across the channel for sympathy and inspiration.

There was already a certain amount of commercial intercourse between Britain and Gaul, and Cæsar endeavoured to ascertain by questioning the merchants engaged in that trade what was the size of the island, what were its best harbours, and what the customs and warlike usages of the natives. On none of these points, however, could he obtain satisfactory information. The proconsul therefore sent a lieutenant named Volusenus with a swift ship to reconnoitre the nearer coast, but he returned in five days without having ventured to land. Meanwhile, as the object of the general’s prolonged stay in the territory of the Morini became more and more evident, messengers from certain of the British tribes began to cross the channel, charged—so Cæsar says—with a commission to promise “obedience to the rule of the Roman people,” and to give hostages as a pledge of their fidelity. The arrival of the ambassadors and their attempt to turn the proconsul from his purpose by fair speech and unmeaning promises we may well believe. How much the Regni and the Cantii knew about the rule of the Roman people, and what intention they had of loyally submitting to it, may be left uncertain. Cæsar, however, availed himself of the opportunity to send over with these returning envoys a certain Celtic chieftain named Commius, whom he had himself made king of the continental Atrebates, and on whose fidelity he thought that he could rely, to exhort the native tribes peacefully to accept the dominion of the Roman people, as the representative of whom Cæsar himself would shortly make his appearance among them. This mission of Commius proved quite fruitless. As soon as he landed—so he said—the Britons arrested him and loaded him with chains, and it was only after the defeat which will shortly be described that they sent him back to Cæsar. As we find Commius only four years later taking a leading part in the insurrection of the tribes in the north of Gaul, and professing an especial hostility to all who bore the name of Roman, we may, perhaps, doubt whether, even at this time, his pleas for subjection were as earnest, or the chains imposed upon him by the Britons as heavy, as Cæsar’s narrative would seem to imply.

Cæsar had determined to make his exploratory voyage with two legions, the Seventh and the Tenth. He perhaps hoped that actual war would not be necessary to bring about the formal submission of the tribes on the coast, and he therefore did not take with him more than the 8,000 to 10,000 men, which were probably the actual muster of two legions, and a body of cavalry whose precise number is not stated. As fighting, however, might, after all, prove to be necessary, he took care that one of the legions which accompanied him should be the famous Tenth on whose courage and devotion he often relied, not in vain. To transport the legions he had collected about eighty cargo ships (naves onerariæ), many of which had been employed the year before in his naval campaign off the coast of Brittany. He had also a certain number of galleys (naves longæ) capable of being rowed much faster than the heavy transport ships could sail. On these latter his staff of officers, quæstors, legates and prefects were embarked, and no doubt the proconsul himself was their companion.

The fleet set sail about midnight on August 26, B.C. 55, or on some day very near to that date. The port of embarkation was probably near to Cape Gris Nez and at the narrowest part of the channel, but almost every sentence of the following narrative has been the subject of an animated topographical discussion, and Cæsar himself mentions no names of places that can be certainly identified.[4] Whatever may have been the harbour from which the legions embarked it was not the same which had been appointed as a rendezvous for the cavalry. These latter were to be borne upon a little fleet of eighteen transports which were detained by a contrary wind at a port eight miles farther up the channel. As we shall see, their ill fortune in the matter of weather continued throughout the expedition, and their consequent inability to co-operate with the legions may have been the chief cause of the expedition’s failure.

As for the main body of the fleet, it must have made an extremely slow voyage, for it was not till the fourth hour of the day (about 8.30 A.M.) that the foremost ships caught sight of the shores of Britain. The landing was evidently not to be unopposed: on all the hills armed bodies of the enemy were drawn up. The word used by Cæsar signifies properly “hills,” but as he goes on to say that “the sea was commanded by such steep mountains that a weapon could easily be hurled from the higher ground to the shore,” we are probably right in understanding these “hills” to be the well-known chalk cliffs of Kent. Seeing therefore no suitable place for landing, Cæsar signalled for his fleet to gather round him, and lay quietly at anchor for five hours. Summoning his staff he imparted to them such information concerning the nature of the country as he had been able to gather from Volusenus, and explained that in maritime warfare such as that in which they were now engaged, liable to be affected by rapid changes of the weather and the sea, it was pre-eminently necessary that they should give prompt obedience to his orders. At about 3 P.M., apparently, the fleet weighed anchor, and, wind and tide having become favourable, moved forward about seven miles and there halted opposite a level and open shore which seemed well adapted for landing.

The barbarians, however, who were of course watching Cæsar’s movements, sent forward their chariots and their cavalry, and following themselves with rapid movements were on the spot to oppose the Romans’ disembarkation. It seemed for some time as if their opposition would be effectual. The ships drawing many feet of water could not approach near to the land, and the soldiers, with their hands encumbered by the pilum or the sword and their bodies weighted with the heavy armour of the Roman legionary, found it no easy matter to jump from the ships, to stagger through the slippery ooze, to defend themselves against the attacks of the nimble and lightly armed barbarians. Seeing this, Cæsar ordered up the galleys, which were rowed rapidly backwards and forwards between the transports and the shore, and from the decks of which slings, bows and balistae freely employed worked havoc among the barbarians, already disposed to terror by the unwonted sight of the triremes. But as the soldiers still hesitated, chiefly on account of the depth of the water into which it was necessary to plunge, the standard-bearer of the Tenth legion, after a short prayer to the gods for good luck to his legion, leapt into the sea, shouting with a loud voice: “Jump! comrades! unless you would see your eagle fall into the enemy’s hands. I at any rate will do my duty to the Republic and our general.” His example was contagious. All the soldiers leapt from the ships and were soon engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the Britons, each man rallying to the standard that was nearest to him as it was hopeless in such a mêlée to form regular rank by legions and cohorts. The barbarians, charging with their horses into deep water, were sometimes able to surround smaller parties of the invaders or to harass them from a distance with their darts. Hereupon, Cæsar filled the boats of the long ships and some of the lighter skiffs with soldiers, who rowing rapidly backwards and forwards carried help where it was most needed.

It was probably at this stage of the encounter that an incident took place which is recorded not by Cæsar himself but by Valerius Maximus, an anecdote-collector of a later date. He tells us that a legionary named Scæva with four comrades rowed to a rock surrounded by the sea and from thence dealt destruction with their arrows among the Britons. Before long the ebbing tide made their rock accessible from the shore and the other soldiers thought it was time to row back to their ship. Scæva, refusing to accompany them, was soon surrounded by the barbarians, with whom he fought single-handed. Many he killed, but he himself suffered fearfully. His thigh was pierced by an arrow, his face smashed by a stone, his shield broken. At last he threw himself into the sea and swam to his vessel. Cæsar and the officers began to applaud him for his bravery, but he flung himself at the proconsul’s feet and with tears implored forgiveness for the military crime of the loss of his shield.

When the great body of the soldiers had at last struggled to the shore and could fight on firm land, Roman discipline soon prevailed over barbarian ardour. The Britons took to flight, but the absence of cavalry, bitterly regretted by Cæsar, checked pursuit. Next day there came ambassadors from the dispirited Britons praying for pardon, bringing the liberated Commius and promising to obey all Cæsar’s orders. After a grave rebuke for having violated the laws of nations by imprisoning his messengers, the proconsul granted his forgiveness and ordered the natives to hand over hostages for their good faith. A few were given, the rest who were to be sent by the more distant tribes were promised but never came. The reason of this failure of the negotiations (if they had ever had a chance of success) was the catastrophe which befel the lingering squadron with its freight of cavalry. On the fourth day after Cæsar’s landing, the eighteen ships with the horsemen on board drew nigh to Britain. Already they were descried by their comrades on shore when so violent a storm arose that they were hopelessly beaten off their course. Some were driven straight back to the harbour which they had quitted, others with imminent danger of shipwreck drifted down channel and at last, waterlogged and nearly helpless, regained some port in Gaul.

On the night which followed this disastrous day, a night of full moon, the unusually high tide, a marvel and a mystery to these children of the Mediterranean, surrounded the Roman ships which had been drawn up, as they hoped, high and dry on the beach. Cables were broken, anchors lost, some of the ships probably dashed against one another; it seemed as though Cæsar would be stranded without ships and without supplies on the inhospitable shore of Britain. He at once sent out some of his soldiers to collect supplies from the Kentish harvest fields, and set others to repair those ships, whose repair was yet possible, at the expense of their hopelessly ruined companions. He admits an entire loss of twelve, but leaves us to infer that the remainder were patched into some sort of seaworthiness. By this time undoubtedly the one thought of both general and army was how to get safe back to Gaul; and naturally the one thought of the Britons, who knew all that had occurred, was how to prevent that return. The promised hostages of course never appeared; and a troop of barbarians ambushed in a neighbouring forest watched for a favourable opportunity of attacking the Romans. That opportunity came one day when the soldiers of the Seventh legion were out foraging in the harvest fields. The sentinels in the Roman camp descried a cloud of dust rising in the direction whither their comrades had gone, and brought word to the general, who at once suspected that the precarious peace was broken and that mischief was abroad. Sallying forth with four cohorts he found that it was even so. The barbarians had emerged from their ambush, had fallen upon the unsuspecting legionaries, quietly engaged in reaping the British harvest, had slain a few of them and were harassing the rest with “alarums and excursions” by their cavalry and their charioteers.

At this point Cæsar interrupts his narrative to describe the British custom of using chariots in war, a custom which was evidently strange and disconcerting to the Roman soldiery. “This,” he says, “is their manner of fighting. First they drive their horses about in all directions, hurling darts, and by the very terror of their horses and clashing of their wheels often throw the ranks [of their enemies] into confusion. Then when they have insinuated themselves between the squadrons of the [hostile] cavalry they leap from their chariots and fight on foot. The charioteers meanwhile gradually draw out of the fray and so place the cars that if their friends should be overborne by the multitude of the enemy they may easily take refuge with them. In this way they combine the rapid movements of cavalry with the steadiness of infantry, and have acquired such a degree of dexterity by daily practice that they can hold up their galloping horses in the steepest descents, check and turn them in a moment, run along the pole or sit on the yoke, and then as quickly as possible fly back into the car.” It will be observed that Cæsar says nothing about the famous scythe-armed chariots of the Britons which, as has been often suggested, would surely on a battlefield be as dangerous to friends as to foes.

Cæsar’s arrival rescued his troops from their perilous position, and he was able to lead them back in safety to the camp. Many stormy days followed, during which warlike operations were necessarily suspended on both sides, but the barbarians employed the interval in beating up recruits from all quarters, attracted by the hope of plunder and of making an end at one blow of the army of invasion, whose scanty numbers moved them to contempt. When fighting was resumed the legions easily repelled the British attack, and some horsemen who had been brought by Commius, though only thirty in number, enabled Cæsar to pursue the flying foe for some distance, to kill many of them and to lay waste a wide extent of country with fire and sword. The usual group of penitent ambassadors appeared the same day in Cæsar’s camp; the usual excuses were offered; were accepted as a matter of necessity; and twice the number of hostages was ordered to be surrendered. It did not greatly matter how many were demanded, for Cæsar had no intention of awaiting their delivery. Soon after midnight the Roman fleet set sail, and the whole army returned eventually safe to Gaul, though two of the ships bearing 300 men drifted down the coast of Picardy, and the soldiers, attacked by no fewer than 6,000 of the Morini, had much ado to defend themselves till the general sent a force of cavalry to their succour.

On the arrival of Cæsar’s despatches in Rome the senate ordered a solemn supplicatio or thanksgiving to the gods, which was to last for twenty days. The British expedition had been a daring and a showy exploit, but no one knew better than Cæsar himself that it had been an entire failure, and that nothing had really been done towards bringing a single British tribe under “the rule of the Roman people”. If this island was to be conquered, it was plain that a much larger force than two legions would be needed for the work. This Cæsar recognised, and accordingly he determined to make another attempt next year (B.C. 54) with five legions (perhaps about 21,000 men) and 2,000 cavalry. The previous campaign had evidently convinced the general of the importance of mounted men for this kind of warfare. He was also determined to have a longer interval before the autumnal equinox for the conduct of his campaign than he had allowed himself in the previous year, and accordingly somewhere about July 23 he set sail from the Portus Itius. He would, in fact, have started at least three weeks earlier, but the wind had been blowing persistently from a point a long way to the north of west. As soon as it shifted to the south-west, the fleet (which with all its companions consisted of 800 ships) started at sunset. In the night, however, the wind fell and the tide (which probably neither Cæsar nor any of his officers understood) carried the ships far out of their course. When the sun arose they saw that Britain was far behind them, on their left hand. Dropping their sails, they took to the oars, and Cæsar has words of well-deserved praise for his sturdy soldiers, who rowed so well that they made the heavy transport ships keep up with the lighter galleys which, as before, accompanied them. By a little after noon they reached the coast of Britain, apparently at their old landing-place. Their disembarkation was not now opposed; the Britons having, as it seems, lost heart when they saw so vast a flotilla approaching their shores.

Notwithstanding his larger armament, Cæsar’s second invasion was in many respects a mere replica of the first, and it is hardly worth while to describe it in equal detail. There was again a violent tempest which swept the fleet from its anchorage, destroyed forty of the ships, and obliged Cæsar to waste ten precious days in repairing the remainder. Toilsome as the task must be, he judged it advisable to draw all his ships up on land and surround them with a wall of circumvallation. When we remember that this was the precaution adopted by the Greeks who warred in Troy, we see how little essential change had been wrought in naval warfare in the course of 1,000 years. Meanwhile the Britons had assembled in large numbers in order to oppose the progress of the invaders, and had entrusted the national defence to a chief named Cassivellaunus who ruled over some of the tribes north of the Thames. Hitherto he had made himself apparently more feared than loved by his dealings with neighbouring tribes: the Trinobantes, especially, who dwelt in the district now known as Essex, had seen their king murdered and their king’s son made a fugitive by his orders; but now in the supreme hour of danger the hard, unscrupulous soldier was by general consent chosen as a kind of dictator.

After some preliminary skirmishes in which the heavily armed Roman legionaries suffered severely from the dashing onslaught and rapid retreat of the British chariots and cavalry, Cæsar determined to cross the Thames and beard the lion Cassivellaunus in his den. He was stationed on the north bank of the river which was fordable, but defended by sharp stakes placed in the bed of the stream. It is not quite clear from Cæsar’s account how this obstacle of the stakes was dealt with by his soldiers. Possibly they may have been partly removed by the cavalry whom he says that he sent first into the water. They were followed by the legionaries, who went, he says, so swiftly and with such a dash, though only their heads were out of water, that the enemy, unable to stand before the combined rush of horsemen and foot soldiers, left their stations on the bank and scattered in flight.

As was so often the case with these Celtic tribes, domestic discord in some degree lightened the labours of the invader. We have seen that Cassivellaunus had obtained by violence the sovereignty of the Trinobantes of Essex. Mandubracius, the son of the dead king, had fled to Gaul and cast himself on the protection of Cæsar, in whose train he returned to Britain. There was still probably a party in favour of the dethroned family, and it was not a mere formality when Cæsar ordered the tribe to accept Mandubracius for their chief, to supply his troops with corn, and to deliver forty hostages into his hands. Five other tribes whose unimportant names are given by Cæsar came in and made their submission; and from them the general learned that not far distant was the town (oppidum) of Cassivellaunus, filled with a multitude of men and cattle, and defended by forests and marshes. “Now the Britons,” says Cæsar, perhaps with a sneer, “call any place a town” (oppidum) “when they have chosen a position entangled with forests and strengthened it with rampart and ditch, so that they may gather into it for shelter from hostile incursion.” Thither then marched Cæsar with his legions. He found a place splendidly strong by nature and art, but he determined to attack it from two sides at once. After a brief defence, the natives collapsed before the headlong rush of the Romans, and streamed out of the camp on the opposite side. Many were slain, many taken prisoners, and a great number of cattle fell into the hands of the Romans.

In order probably to divert the forces of his enemy from his own oppidum, the generalissimo Cassivellaunus had sent orders to the four kings of Kent to collect their forces and make a sudden attack on the naval camp of the Romans. The attack was repulsed by a vigorous sortie: many of the Britons were slain and one of their noblest leaders taken prisoner. Hereupon Cassivellaunus, recognising that the fortune of war was turning against him and that his own confederates were falling away, sent messengers to offer his submission and obtain peace through the mediation of his friend, perhaps his fellow-tribesman, Commius. Cæsar, who had his own reasons for desiring a speedy return to Gaul and who doubtless considered that enough had been done for his glory, accepted the proffered submission. He “ordered hostages to be delivered, and fixed the amount of tribute which was to be yearly paid by Britannia to the Roman people. He forbade Cassivellaunus to do any injury to Mandubracius or the Trinobantes,” and with these high-sounding phrases he departed. As he carried back many captives and not a few of his ships had perished in the storm, he had to make two crossings with his fleet, but both were accomplished without disaster. Of Cassivellaunus himself no further information is vouchsafed us, nor do we know what was the fate of the abandoned allies of Rome.

The great general in this instance “had come and had seen” but had not “conquered”. Most valuable, however, to us is the information which he has given us concerning our sequestered island, though in some cases it is evidently inaccurate. We need not linger over Cæsar’s geographical statements, though it is curious to see how certain errors of earlier geographers still lingered on even into the Augustan age of Roman literature. Thus he thinks that, of the three sides of Britain’s triangle one looks towards Gaul and the east, another towards Spain and the west, while the third, which has no land opposite it, faces north. Besides Ireland, which is half the size of Britain, there are other islands, apparently on the west, concerning which certain writers have said that they have continual night during thirty days of winter. As to this Cæsar was not able to obtain any definite information, but his own clepsydræ (water clocks) showed him that the nights in July were shorter in Britain than on the continent.

“Of all the natives far the most civilised are those who inhabit the district of Kent, which is all situated on the coast: nor do these differ greatly in their manners from the inhabitants of Gaul. Those who live farther inland sow no corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clothed in skins. All the Britons however dye themselves with woad, which gives them a blue colour and makes them look more terrible in battle. They wear long hair and shave every part of the body except the head and the upper lip. Ten or a dozen men have their wives in common, especially brothers with brothers, fathers with their sons, the woman’s offspring being reckoned to him who first cohabited with her.” This ghastly statement is probably a mere traveller’s tale, utterly untrue of the Celts of Britain or of any other Aryan tribe. It has been thought that it may possibly have been derived from an institution something like the Sclavonic mir, which caused all the descendants of one married couple for two or three generations to herd together in a single household. “The interior of Britain is inhabited by tribes which are, according to their own tradition, aboriginal: the sea-coast by those which for the sake of plunder have crossed over from Belgic Gaul, and after carrying on war have settled there and begun to cultivate the land. It is in consequence of this that nearly all of them have the same tribal names as those of the states from which they came. There is an infinite number of inhabitants, and one constantly meets with buildings almost like those of Gaul, as well as a great number of cattle.”

“They use either golden money or thin bars of iron of a certain weight which pass for money.” Thus (according to the best reading of a much-disputed passage) does Cæsar speak as to the numismatic attainments of the Britons. We shall probably never know more than this as to the iron currency or quasi-currency of our predecessors; but the statement as to their gold currency has been entirely confirmed by modern discoveries. The most curious fact, however, in connexion with the pre-Roman gold coinage of Britain is that it is evidently an imitation, though a most barbarous imitation, of the coinage of Philip II. of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. In the British imitations the fine classical features of the Macedonian monarch are twisted into the ignoble profile of a savage, while the curls of the hair and the leaves of the laurel crown, mechanically repeated and magnified, fill up the greater part of the coin. The effigy of a charioteer on the reverse of the coin is attempted to be copied in the same grotesque fashion with rather less success than the drawing of a child upon its slate. The charioteer himself is gradually resolved into a cluster of atoms, and though the likeness of the horse is for some time preserved, he is furnished with eight legs and gradually dwindles away into the spectre of a rocking-horse. Yet these queer pieces of money which occasionally turn up in English soil are intensely interesting, as showing how the influence of Greek art penetrated even into our world-forgotten island three centuries before the birth of Christ, travelling possibly by the same commercial route between the Euxine and the Baltic by which the Runes passed up from Thrace to Scandinavia, and the highly prized amber descended from Stralsund to Odessa.

Cæsar proceeds to inform us that “tin (plumbum album) is found in the midland parts of the country [as to this he was of course misinformed]; iron in the maritime regions, but in small quantities; all the bronze used is imported. There is timber of all kinds, as in Gaul, save the fir and the beech. They do not think it right to eat hares, geese or poultry, but keep these animals as pets. The climate is more temperate than that of Gaul, the cold less intense.” One regrets to learn from Strabo, who wrote half a century after Cæsar, that though “the climate is rainy rather than snowy, even in clear weather mists prevail so long that through the whole day the sun is visible only for three or four hours about noon”.

In reviewing the history of Cæsar’s invasions of Britain we naturally inquire what was his object in fitting out those expeditions, why did they fail and why did he acquiesce in their failure. Whatever may have been the motive of the first (which, according to him, was chiefly the assistance given by the Britons to the cause of his Gaulish enemies), the second expedition at any rate, on which from 20,000 to 30,000 men were employed, cannot have been a mere reconnaissance, undertaken in the interests of scientific discovery. It was no doubt politic to stimulate the zeal of his partisans in Rome by voyages and marches which appeared to be

Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought,

but the general would hardly have spent so much treasure and risked the lives of so many of his legionaries without some hope of substantial advantage to himself, his soldiers, or the republic. Evidently the Britons fought better than he expected. Probably also, the forests and the marshes of the country made the movements of his troops exceptionally difficult. We can perceive also that the country was not so rich as he had hoped to find it—an important consideration for a general who had to reward his soldiers by frequent opportunities of “loot”. “We already know,” wrote Cicero to his brother Quintus, “that there is not an ounce of silver in that island nor any hope of booty except slaves, among whom I do not think you will expect to find any skilled in literature or music.” The only spoil that we hear of Cæsar’s carrying back from Britain was a breastplate adorned with precious pearls, which he dedicated in the Temple of Victory at Rome.

One argument which doubtless influenced Cæsar against attempting a third expedition was derived from the peculiarly stormy and baffling character of the sea at the Straits of Dover. Each of his expeditions had been endangered and all but ruined by these unaccountable tides, these suddenly rising gales. He had to learn by bitter experience how different was that strange chopping sea from the peaceful waters of the Mediterranean. Had he been able to survey the channel more thoroughly, he would probably have found it worth while to make his passage at a broader part of it, like that which now separates Newhaven from Dieppe; perhaps even to anticipate the Saxon chieftains of the fifth century, to occupy the Isle of Wight, or to seek for his fleet the shelter of Southampton Water. After all, however, a sufficient reason for not renewing the attempt to conquer Britain was to be found in the precarious state of Roman dominion in Gaul. Cæsar evidently thought that his work in that country was practically finished in B.C. 55, when he first set his face towards Britain. Far otherwise: the hardest part of that work was yet to come. Five months after Cæsar’s return from his second expedition he heard the terrible tidings of the utter destruction of fifteen Roman cohorts by the Eburones. Then followed the revolt of Vercingetorix, bravest and most successful of Gaulish champions; the unsuccessful siege of Gergovia; the siege, successful but terribly hard to accomplish, of Alesia. Certainly we may say that the two years and a half which followed his return from Britain were among the most anxious, and seemed sometimes the most desperate stages in all that wonderful career which ended when, ten years after he had sailed away from Britain, he fell pierced by more than twenty dagger wounds—

E’en at the base of Pompey’s statua,

Which all the while ran blood.

NOTE
ON CÆSAR’S POINTS OF ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE IN HIS EXPEDITIONS TO BRITAIN.

I. As to the point of embarkation from Gaul, the controversy lies principally between Boulogne and Wissant, Sir George Airy’s suggestion that Cæsar sailed from the estuary of the Somme being not easy to reconcile with his own statement that he went to the country of the Morini, “because thence was the shortest transit to Britain”.

Boulogne, which was called by the Romans first Gesoriacum and then Bononia, was undoubtedly the regular harbour for passengers to Britain under the empire, and there would be little doubt that Cæsar started thence if he had not told us that the second expedition (presumably also the first) sailed from Portus Itius. It is not clear why Cæsar should have called Gesoriacum by any other name.

The advocates of Wissant identify the Itian promontory with Cape Gris Nez, well known to all passengers from Dover to Calais, and think that its name would be naturally shared with the neighbouring village of Wissant, which was probably at one time nearer to the sea than it is now. On the whole, though the arguments on both sides are pretty evenly balanced, those in favour of Wissant seem slightly to preponderate.

II. Sailing, then, from some port in Picardy (either Boulogne or Wissant), Cæsar reached a part of the British coast which from his description looks like the chalk cliffs west of Dover. So far there is not much difference between the commentators, but what happened in the afternoon when, after his long halt, he found the wind and tide both in his favour, gave the signal to weigh anchor, and “having advanced (progressus) about eight miles from that place, brought his ships to a stand at a level and open beach”? Certainly the natural rendering of these words would seem to be that he went seven English miles up channel, and so if he had really anchored off Dover he would reach Deal, and that port would be, as it has been generally supposed to be, the scene of the world-historical landing of the first Roman soldiers in Britain. It must be admitted, however, that there are great difficulties in this hypothesis. The most careful and minute inquiries that have been made seem to show that on that day (the fourth before the full moon) and at that hour (3 P.M.), the tide, if it ebbed and flowed as it does now, would be setting down, not up, the channel: and accordingly many authors have come to the conclusion that Cæsar sailed westward for those seven miles and landed either at Hythe or Lymne (well known afterwards to the Romans as Portus Lemanis), or possibly at some such place as Appledore, now inland but then at the head of a very sheltered bay.

The discussion is much complicated by the undoubted fact of the great changes which have taken place in that part of the coastline, and Dr. Guest is perhaps entitled to argue that these changes may have so altered the set of the tides as to allow him to postulate an eastward flowing tide when Cæsar weighed anchor in the afternoon. It must, however, remain for the present a disputed question: Cæsar’s word, “progressus,” on the one side, the present course of the tides on the other. On the whole it seems to me that the balance of probability is slightly in favour of Deal.

Among the authors who have written on this question may be mentioned Airy, Lewin, Appach, in favour of some port west of Dover; Long, Merivale, Guest, in favour of Deal. Guest’s arguments are perhaps the most satisfactory, but justice should be done to the extremely painstaking little treatise of Appach (Caius Julius Cæsar’s British Expeditions, etc., 1868), who, however, surely attempts the impossible in his elaborate back-calculations of the winds and tides of two thousand years ago.

On the question of the point of departure from Gaul, reference may be made to T. R. Holmes’s Conquest of Gaul (London, 1899) and to F. Haverfield’s review of that book in English Historical Review, xviii., 334–6.

CHAPTER III.
THE CENTURY OF SUSPENSE.

The second invasion of Britain by Cæsar took place, according to Roman reckoning, in the year 700 from the foundation of the City. The next, the successful invasion which was ordered by his collateral descendant in the fourth generation, the Emperor Claudius, took place in the year 797 of the same reckoning. There was thus all but a century between the two events; that century which more powerfully than any other, before or after, has influenced the course of human history; yet which for that very reason, because in our chronology the years change from B.C. to A.D., the historical student sometimes finds it hard to recognise in its true perspective.

As far as the work of the literary historian goes, Britain is almost a blank page during the whole of this century. It may be said that to the eyes of the Romans, her own mists closed round her when Cæsar left her shores, B.C. 54, and did not rise till Aulus Plautius approached them, A.D. 43. But the patient toil of the numismatist[5] has discovered the names of some British kings and enabled us to say something as to their mutual relations; a few brief notices of Roman historians have faintly illumined the scene; and it is now just possible to discern the actual lineaments of one who is not entirely a creature of romance—the royal Cymbeline.

As has been already mentioned, a certain Commius, king of the continental Atrebates, was sent on an unsuccessful mission to Britain before Cæsar’s first invasion. In the mighty refluent wave of the Gaulish revolt against Rome, Commius either was actually swept away from his former fidelity or was suspected of being thus disloyal. However this might be, a foul attempt at his assassination, planned by Cæsar’s lieutenant, Labienus, converted him into an embittered enemy of Rome. He took part in the great campaigns of Vercingetorix; when they failed he sought succour from the other side of the Rhine; as captain of a band of freebooters he preyed on the subjects of Rome. At length (B.C. 51), seeing that further resistance was hopeless, he made his submission to Mark Antony, his only stipulation being that he might be allowed to go and dwell in some land where he would never again be offended by the sight of a Roman. With these words he vanishes from the pages of the historian of the Gallic war. As we find about the same time, or a little later, a certain Commius coining money in Britain, it is, at least, a tempting theory that the Roman-hating Gaulish refugee came to our island and reigned here over his kindred Atrebates and other tribes besides.

Actual coins of Commius are, it must be admitted, not too certainly extant, but the large number of coins struck by three British kings who are proud to proclaim themselves his sons, clearly attest his existence and justify us in attributing to him considerable importance. These three British kings were Tincommius, Verica and Eppillus, and their dominions stretched from Hampshire to Kent. Their reigns probably occupied the last thirty years before the Christian era, and their coins exhibit an increasing tendency towards Roman manners and Roman art. The old barbaric survivals of the Macedonian effigies gradually disappear; classical profiles are introduced and the cornucopiæ, the eagle and the lion sometimes make their appearance.

A British prince who was apparently a contemporary and a neighbour, possibly a rival of the family of Commius, was named Dubnovellaunus. The obverse of his coins shows a remarkable similarity to some of those of the just-mentioned King Eppillus. But the interesting fact in connexion with this otherwise unknown British chieftain is that a monument in the heart of Asia Minor preserves his name and records his dealings with the Roman Imperator. In the Turkish town of Angora on the side of a desolate Galatian hill stand the ruins of the marble temple of Augustus and Rome: and on the walls of the porch of that temple is a long bilingual inscription, recording in Latin and Greek the most memorable events of the fifty-eight years’ reign of the fortunate Augustus. Towards the end we find this passage: “To me fled as suppliant the Kings of the Parthians Tiridates and afterwards Phraates, Artaxares, son of Phraates, King of the Medes: the Kings of the Britons Dumnobellaunus and Tim ...” (the end of the last name being obliterated). It is not likely that if there had been many similar instances of British princes imploring the protection of Augustus they would have been left unrecorded in the monument of Angora; and it is therefore probably with some little courtly exaggeration that the contemporary geographer Strabo says: “Certain of the rulers of that country [Britain] by embassies and flattering attentions have gained the friendship of Cæsar Augustus and made votive offerings in the capital and have now rendered almost the whole island subject to the Romans”. This is certainly untrue. “The taxes which they bear are in no wise heavy and are levied on imports and exports between Britain and Gaul. The articles of this commerce are ivory rings and necklaces, and amber and vessels of glass and all such trumpery. It is not therefore desirable to put a garrison in the island, for it would require at least one legion and some cavalry in order to ensure the collection of the tribute, and the expense of keeping up such a force would equal the revenue received, since it would be necessary to lessen the customs duties if you were also levying tribute and there would be always a certain amount of danger attending the employment of force.” A very clear and sensible statement surely of the reasons which induced the cautious Augustus finally to abandon his thrice contemplated[6] scheme for the conquest of Britain.

The British kings whom we have lately been describing reigned chiefly south of the Thames. North of that river in Middlesex, Herts and Essex (the district occupied by Cassivellaunus at the time of Cæsar’s invasion) there was reigning, probably from about B.C. 35 to A.D. 5, a chief named Tasciovanus, practically unknown in literary history but abundantly made known to us by his coins, which, though still for the most part barbarous, show some signs of Roman influence. His capital was Verulamium, the little Hertfordshire town which now bears the name of the martyred Saint Alban. On his death, which probably occurred about A.D. 5, he was succeeded by his two sons, one of whom, Cunobelinus, reigned at Camulodunum (the modern Colchester) over the Trinobantes and probably other tribes. Of him not only are the coins numerous and well known, but as the Cymbeline of Shakespeare’s drama, his name will be in the mouths of men as long as English literature endures. Of course the Cymbeline of the play has very little in common with the faintly outlined Cunobelinus of history. The lovely Imogen, faithful to her husband unto seeming death; the clownish Cloten, the wicked queen, the selfish boaster Leonatus; all these are mere creatures of the poet’s brain, of whom neither the romancer Geoffrey of Monmouth nor his copyist Holinshed had ever spoken. Yet in the conception of Cymbeline’s character, as an old king who rules his family and his court with little wisdom, there is nothing which clashes with historic truth; and the way in which Shakespeare has described the attitude of these little British princes towards the great, distant, dreadful power of Rome is surely one of the many evidences of his power of realising by instinct rather than by reason the political condition of a by-gone age. It may be noted in passing that Geoffrey of Monmouth informs us, whatever his information may be worth, that Kymbelinus, as he calls this king, “was a great soldier and had been brought up by Augustus Cæsar. He had contracted so great a friendship with the Romans that he freely paid them tribute when he might very well have refused it. In his days our Lord Jesus Christ was born.”

A certain Adminius, who seems to have been a son of Cunobelinus, being expelled by his father, fled to the Roman camp in Germany with a small band of followers, and their humble supplications to the Emperor Caligula (37–41) caused that insane egotist to vaunt himself as the conqueror of Britain. A pompous epistle conveyed to the Senate the news of this great triumph, and the bearers thereof were especially charged to enter the city in a state-chariot and to deliver their important communication only in the Temple of Mars and to a crowded assembly. But the buffoonery of the nephew was to be followed by the serious labour of the uncle. The conquest of Britain was now nigh at hand.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ROMAN CONQUEST OF BRITAIN.

In the year 41 after Christ’s birth the short madness of Caligula’s dominion over the world was ended by his assassination in one of the long corridors of the Palatine. His uncle Claudius, the despised weakling of the imperial family, dragged forth trembling from his hiding-place behind a curtain, and to his intense surprise acclaimed as Augustus by the mutinous Prætorians: this was the man for whom by a strange destiny was reserved the glory of adding Britain to the Roman Empire. Yet Claudius, for all his odd ways, his shambling gait, his shaking head, his stammering speech, was by no means the mere fool whom his relatives, ashamed of his physical deficiencies, had affected to consider him. He wrote in countless books the story of his imperial ancestors and his own; he knew the old Etruscan tongue, a knowledge, alas! now lost to the world, and translated treatises written therein; he cleared out the harbour of Ostia; he planted flourishing colonies; he brought water to Rome from the Æquian hills by the aqueduct which bears his name. Could the poor timorous old man have ventured to rely on himself, and to act on his own initiative, his name had perhaps been revered as that of one of the best emperors of Rome. It was his reliance on his wives and his freedmen, the government of the boudoir and the servants’ hall, which ruined his reputation with posterity.

It was probably in the same year in which Claudius succeeded to the empire, or it may have been a year later, that old King Cunobelinus died in Britain and was succeeded by his two sons, Caratacus[7] and Togodumnus. There was, as usual, an exiled prince (whose name was Bericus) claiming Roman assistance for his restoration to his country, but whether he was one of the sons of Cunobelinus or not, neither history nor the coins inform us. The petition of the exiled Bericus was granted by Claudius, and an expedition was resolved on, nominally for his restoration (from this point onwards his name disappears from history), in reality for the conquest of Britain (A.D. 43). The command of the expedition was entrusted to Aulus Plautius, a senator of high rank—he had been consul fourteen years before with the Emperor Tiberius—and was possibly a kinsman of Claudius by marriage. Under his orders marched four legions[8]:—

The Second: Augusta.
The Ninth: Hispana.
The Fourteenth: Gemina Martia; and
The Twentieth: Valeria Victrix.

All of these but the Ninth were withdrawn from service in Germany, and that legion came from Pannonia, in modern language Hungary west of the Danube. The Second and the Twentieth legions found a permanent home in our island; the Ninth, a grave; the Fourteenth after a brilliant career was withdrawn to Italy after about twenty-five years of British service. We have no exact statement of the number of the army of Plautius. The legions, if at their full complement, should stand for 20,000 men: the cavalry and cohorts of the allies should at least double that number. We are probably not far wrong in putting the invading force at 50,000, but the difficulty of forming an exact estimate is shown by the divergence between the calculations of two such experts as Mommsen and Hübner, the former of whom reckons the total at 40,000, and the latter at 70,000 men.

Not without great difficulty (says our sole authority, Dion Cassius) was the army induced to depart from Gaul. The soldiers grumbled sorely at being called to do military service “outside of the habitable world,” and Claudius deemed it advisable to send to them his freedman-minister Narcissus to overcome their reluctance. The glib-tongued Greek mounted the general’s rostrum and began to harangue them greatly to his own satisfaction. But it was too much for the patience of the veteran legionaries to hear this imperial lackey, this liberated slave, preaching to them about their military duty. They shouted him down with a well-concerted cry of Io Saturnalia (Hurrah for the slaves’ holiday), and then with the curious illogicality of soldiers they turned to Plautius and said that for his sake they would willingly follow wherever he led them. All this hesitation had caused considerable delay, but at last the flotilla bearing the soldiers embarked in three divisions, in order that the whole expedition might not be put to the hazard of a single landing. The soldiers were much disheartened when they found the winds or the tides apparently drifting them back to the port from which they had started, but then a meteor flashing from east to west seemed to indicate that their voyage would be prosperous and encouraged them to proceed. Their landing, or, more properly speaking, their three landings, were accomplished without difficulty, for the Britons, believing that the expedition was postponed on account of the mutiny, had made no preparations, and now fled to the forests and the marshes, hoping that the experience of the great Julius would be repeated and that this expedition also might soon return empty-handed.

Plautius had therefore hard work to discover his foe, but he did at last come to close quarters, first with Caratacus and then with Togodumnus, both of whom he overcame. Either now or in the following operations, Togodumnus perished, but his brother survived to be for many years a thorn in the side of the Roman general. A British tribe named the Boduni, of whose geographical position we are ignorant, but who were subjects of the Catuvellauni, came in and offered their submission. Plautius left a garrison among them and marching forward arrived at the banks of a river, possibly the Medway, which the barbarians fondly hoped could not be traversed without a bridge. The Roman general, however, had in his army many Gaulish soldiers, probably those dwelling near the mouths of the Rhine and the Waal, who were accustomed to swim with all their armour on across the swiftest streams. These men, at the word of command, plunged into the river, swam across, attacked the dismayed and carelessly encamped barbarians, and directing their weapons especially against the horses harnessed to the chariots made the usual cavalry tactics of the Britons impossible. The young Vespasian (future emperor, and conqueror of the Jews) and his brother Sabinus were ordered to lead some more troops across the stream and complete the victory, which they did, slaying multitudes of the barbarians. Still the Britons made a stubborn resistance, till at last an officer named Cnæus Hosidius Geta, a kind of Roman paladin who had before this done knightly deeds in fighting against the Moors, almost single-handed and at the imminent risk of capture, achieved a victory which compelled them to retire, and for which he received the honours of a triumph.

Hereupon the Britons withdrew behind the Thames, at that time and place a broad and shallow stream flowing wide over the marshes of Essex. The barbarians knew well its deeps and its shallows, and could find their way across it in safety. Not so the Romans, who suffered severe loss in attempting to follow them. As a mere question of strategy Plautius could probably have marched up the stream and crossed it at some narrower part of its course. He determined, however, to reserve this achievement for the emperor who had apparently already arranged to visit Britain and pluck the laurels planted for him by his general. Claudius prepared reinforcements, including, we are told, a number of elephants (not very serviceable, one would have thought, in the Essex marshes), sailed from his own port of Ostia to Marseilles, then travelled, chiefly by water, up and down the great rivers of Gaul, arrived at the camp of Plautius, crossed the Thames, the proper appliances having no doubt been prepared by the loyal general, and then marched on Camulodunum, which he took, making the palace of Cunobelinus his own. The fall of the powerful kingdom of the Catuvellauni brought with it the submission, voluntary or forced, of many neighbouring tribes.

Claudius was saluted not once but many times as Imperator by his soldiers, and returning to Rome after a six months’ absence he was hailed by the Senate with the appellation of Britannicus, an honour which was also bestowed on his six-year-old son. He rode in his triumphal chariot up to the capitol, and he erected some years later in honour of this conquest a triumphal arch which spanned the Via Lata (now the Corso), and which was still standing almost perfect till the seventeenth century, when it was destroyed (1662) by Pope Alexander VII. Some fine sculptured slabs from this arch are still preserved in the Villa Borghese at Rome, along with fragments of an inscription which record that “Tiberius Claudius Augustus, Germanicus and Pious, tamed the Kings of Britain without any loss [to the republic], and was the first to bring her barbarous races under the control of Rome”.

* * * * *

The capture of Camulodunum involved the downfall of the house of Cymbeline, and the acceptance, at any rate the temporary acceptance, of Roman domination in all the south-eastern part of Britain. While Caratacus escaped to South Wales and there organised a desperate resistance to the Roman arms among the Silures, most of the smaller British chieftains seem to have bowed their necks beneath the yoke. An inscribed stone still standing in Goodwood Park, but originally found at Chichester, seems to record the building of a temple to Neptune and Minerva for the safety of the imperial house, at the command of King Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, “legate of Augustus in Britain”. This inscription is an interesting confirmation of the statement made by Tacitus that “certain cities were handed over to King Cogidubnus who remained till our own day most faithful to the emperor, according to the old and long-established custom of the Roman people to make even kings the instruments of their dominion”.[9]

It was probably about the same time that Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk, Suffolk and a part of Cambridgeshire, became a subject ally of Rome. Farther south the invaders were making less peaceful progress, if it be true, as we are told by the biographer of the future Emperor Vespasian, that he in these early years of the conquest “fought thirty battles as commander of the Second legion, subdued two powerful nations, took more than twenty towns and brought into subjection the Isle of Wight”. We learn from another source that he was once, when surrounded by the barbarians and in imminent peril of his life, rescued by his brave son Titus, and further that it was the elder soldier’s distinguished successes in this British war which won him the favour of the Roman people, and led to his being eventually clad in the imperial purple. An interesting evidence of the rapid development of this first act of the Roman conquest is afforded by the fact that a pig of lead mined in the Mendip Hills has been discovered, bearing the name of Claudius and his son with a date equivalent to A.D. 49, only six years after the landing of the legions. In the year 47, Aulus Plautius left Britain to receive the honour of an ovation, then almost exclusively reserved for the imperial family, and to find his wife Pomponia (a woman of gentle nature but touched with sadness) tending towards “a foreign religion” which, there is good reason to believe, was none other than Christianity. He probably left the frontier of the Roman dominion nearly coincident with a line drawn diagonally from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, though outlying districts like Cornwall and Devonshire were not yet assimilated by the new lords of Britain. But even so the fairest and most fertile half of Brythonic Britain was now apparently won for the empire.

To the new Roman legatus, Ostorius Scapula, fell the hard labour of fighting the Goidelic nation of the Silures who occupied the hills and valleys of South Wales and were nerved to desperate resistance by the counsels of their willingly adopted leader Caratacus. Wales must therefore undoubtedly have been the main objective of the general, but meanwhile even the part of the country already conquered was not too secure. The lands of the friendly tribes were being overrun by the still unsubdued Britons beyond the border, who thought that winter and the change of commander would both be in their favour. Ostorius, who knew the importance of first impressions, hurriedly collected a sufficient number of troops to repel and harass these marauders, but the stern measures which he took for the defence of the line between Severn and Trent so angered the Iceni (proud of their unconquered condition, “the allies not the subjects” of Rome) that they took up arms, gathered round them a confederacy of the neighbouring tribes and drew themselves up in battle array in a position difficult of access and protected by an embankment, probably of turf. Without much difficulty, Ostorius stormed this rude fort, using only the irregular allied troops and without moving the legions from their quarters. As these irregulars were mostly cavalry and the Icenian camp was impervious to horsemen, the riders had to fight on foot, but nevertheless they won. Deeds of great valour were performed on both sides, and the son of Ostorius won the civic crown for saving the life of a Roman citizen. With the Iceni forced back into sullen tranquillity, and with the wavering tribes round them now siding with the victors, Ostorius was free to turn his attention to the difficult problem of Wales. He led his army into the territory of the Decangi,[10] who probably inhabited what is now Flintshire; he ravaged their fields; he gazed on the sea which separated him from Ireland; he would perhaps have anticipated the conquest of Anglesey had not some hostile movements among the Brigantes of Yorkshire, threatening his communications with the Midlands, warned him against a further advance. When the Brigantes were chastised and in a manner reconciled, he turned again to the work which he probably ought never to have delayed—the vanquishing of the Silures.

This war against the Silures evidently occupied many years, and it is almost admitted by the Roman historian that Caratacus won many victories. Gliding rapidly, however, over this unpleasant interval, Tacitus brings us to the final battle—decisive so far as Caratacus was concerned—which, as a result of the strategy of Caratacus, was fought not in the territory of the Silures but in that of their northern neighbours the Ordovices. On the border of three counties, Shropshire, Hereford and Radnor, is the district in which tradition or the conjecture of learned men has placed the battlefield. High up soars Caer Caradoc, commanding a splendid view of the distant Wrekin. Not far off are the strongly marked lines of Brandon Camp (possibly the work of the soldiers of Ostorius); the quiet little village of Leintwardine, encircled by the rapid waters of the Teme, sleeps at the foot of hills, any one of which may have been the chosen position of the British king. Tacitus describes to us the way in which that position, already strong by the steepness of the hill and the treacherous deeps and shallows of the river, was further strengthened by a barrier of stones where approach seemed least difficult. Caratacus flew from rank to rank, exhorting his countrymen, descendants of the men who had repulsed the great Julius, to do their utmost on that eventful day which would decide their freedom or their slavery for ever. Ostorius, on the other hand, awed by the strength of the British position, was almost inclined to evade the encounter, but the legionaries loudly demanded battle and the officers backed their ardent entreaties. Ostorius thereupon moved forward and crossed the river without great difficulty. At the stone wall matters for a time went ill with the Romans and death was busy in their ranks, but after they had formed a testudo, with their locked shields held on high, they succeeded under its shelter in pulling out the stones of the roughly compacted wall. Once inside the camp, the well-drilled ranks of the Romans soon pierced the disorderly crowd of the barbarians, who had neither helmet nor breastplate to protect them from the sword and the pilum of the legionary, from the rapier and the spear of the auxiliary cohorts. The victory was a brilliant one, and though Caratacus himself escaped, his wife, his daughter and his brethren fell into the hands of the Romans. The liberty of the fugitive prince was of short duration. Having escaped to the court of Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes, he was by her basely surrendered, in chains, to the victorious general. This event which may possibly have taken place some time after the battle, happened, as Tacitus remarks, in the ninth year after the commencement of the British war. This probably means A.D. 51 or 52, the same year in which the inscription was engraved on the triumphal arch of Claudius.

The exhibition of the captive British king who had for so many years defied the power of Rome, was made the occasion of a splendid Roman holiday. The prætorian cohorts were drawn up in the meadows outside their camp (near where now stands the Villa Torlonia), and through the lane formed by their glittering spears passed first the train of the followers of Caratacus, bearing the golden torques, the embossed breastplates and other ornaments which he himself had won in former wars from vanquished kings, then his brothers, his wife and his daughter, and last of all Caratacus himself. He did not crouch or fawn, but looked boldly in the emperor’s face, and (if the speech recorded by Tacitus be not a mere rhetorical exercise) with quiet dignity reminded his conqueror that but for adverse fortune he might have entered Rome in very different guise as an ally, not as a captive. “I had horses, men, arms, wealth. Do you wonder that I was reluctant to lose them? If you wish to lord it over all the world, must others at once accept slavery? Slay me if you will, and I shall soon be forgotten. Preserve my life and I shall be an eternal memorial of your clemency.” The courageous and manly address touched the not ignoble nature of Claudius, who granted pardon to the British king and all his family. He was required, however, to offer thanks for his preservation to the emperor’s wife, Agrippina, mother of Nero, who sat haughtily on a tribunal of her own, not far from that of her husband: “a new and strange sight,” says Tacitus, for Roman soldiers to behold. Far better known than the speech thus recorded by Tacitus is the remark of the British king, preserved by the Greek historian Dion. After his liberation, when he was taken round through the streets of Rome, and saw all the wonders of the city, he said: “And yet you who possess all these things, and many others like them, actually covet the shanties of Britain”. With the capture and pardon of Caratacus, the house of Cymbeline disappears from history. It is implied that he and his family spent the rest of their days in Italy.

* * * * *

For the next seven years (A.D. 52–59), under Didius Gallus and Veranius, the history of Roman conquest was void of striking events. Didius was elderly and disinclined to risk his already great reputation by distant operations against the natives. Veranius, who was probably younger, certainly more adventurous, promised his master Nero (who succeeded Claudius in 54) that in two years the province should be at his feet, but died in his first year of office, with his high hopes unrealised. However, these two governors had apparently succeeded in pushing the Roman frontier northward as far as Chester and Lincoln: they had checked, though not subdued, the Silures, and had rescued their ally Cartimandua from the perilous position in which she had been placed by her indignant subjects, as a punishment for summarily dismissing her husband and handing herself over to his armour-bearer. Probably these seven years of rest were really useful to the cause of the empire. The more civilised tribes in the south and east were adopting Roman ways, and some of them, at any rate, were growing fat on Roman commerce, and if the subordinate officials of the empire would have used their power with moderation Britain might have become Roman without more blood-spilling. Unfortunately, these conditions were not observed, and a day of vengeance was at hand.

In the year 59 Suetonius Paulinus, one of the two greatest generals that obeyed the orders of Nero (Corbulo, conqueror of Armenia, being the other), was appointed legatus of Britain, and began his short but memorable career. Believing that he had a tranquil and easily governed province behind him, and desiring to rival the fame of Corbulo, he determined to attempt the conquest of Anglesey, which was invested with a mysterious awe as the high place of Druidism. After all, the difficulties of the enterprise were spiritual rather than material. A flotilla of flat-bottomed boats transported the legionaries across the Menai Straits; of the cavalry some swam, and some, we are told, forded the channel. But there on the other side stood not only a dense mass of armed men, but women, dressed like Furies with their hair hanging down and with lighted torches in their hands, were rushing about through the ranks, and Druid priests, with their hands upraised to Heaven, in terrible voices called down vengeance on the foe. At the unaccustomed sight the awed legionaries hung back; then the cheering speech of the general and their own reflection—“We must never let ourselves be frightened by a parcel of women and priests”—revived their fainting courage. They carried the eagles forward, hewed down the armed Britons, and used the terrible torches to burn the hostile camp. A fort and garrison were placed in the island in order to maintain the conquest, and the woods in which human sacrifices had been offered and cruel auguries practised with the bleeding limbs of men, were by Roman axes cleared from the face of the earth.

All seemed going splendidly for Roman dominion in Britain when a breathless messenger brought to the tent of Suetonius (A.D. 60)[11] a tale not unlike that with which we were thrilled half a century ago at the outbreak of the Indian mutiny. The outburst of the flame of British discontent was in the country of the Iceni, and the exciting cause was the shameless and heartless greed of the Roman officials. The capital of the new province at this time seems to have been Cymbeline’s old city, Camulodunum (the modern Colchester), which had been turned into a Roman colony, a place in which the time-expired veterans might spend their old age, surrounded by their families, and lording it with no gentle mastership over their British slaves. High in this town, which took its name from Camulus, the Celtic war-god, rose the great temple dedicated to Claudius and Rome, a temple which was almost a fortress; but the town itself was surrounded by no walls, a piece of improvidence for which Tacitus justly blames the generals, who were thinking more of pleasurable ease than of military utility. In the chief house of the colony resided Catus Decianus, the procurator, who represented the emperor in all civil and financial matters, as Suetonius, the legatus, represented him in military affairs. Of all the grasping and unjust officials who made the name of the empire hated, this Catus seems to have been one of the worst. While oppressing the peasants by rigorous exaction of tribute, he demanded from the chiefs the return of the property (probably the result of confiscations from their own fellow-countrymen) which Claudius had bestowed upon them, saying that gifts such as this, of course, reverted to the giver. The financial distress of the unhappy province was aggravated, according to Dion, by the selfish timidity of the philosopher Seneca, Nero’s minister, who chose this opportunity suddenly and harshly to call in loans to the amount of 10,000,000 sesterces (about £90,000 sterling), which he had lent at usurious rates of interest to the natives or the settlers in Britain.

Thus all was ready in Essex for revolt, when Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni, were the scenes of outrages which set fire to the gathered fuel. King Prasutagus, the old and apparently loyal ally of Rome, who had long been famous for his wealth, died leaving the emperor and his own two daughters his joint heirs. There were old examples of this testamentary liberality in Roman history, both Pergamum and Cyprus having been bequeathed by their kings to the Roman people. Prasutagus hoped, we are told, by this display of confidence in the honour of the emperor that he would, at least, safeguard his kingdom and his family from violence. Bitterly was this hope disappointed. At the bidding of the legatus, centurions tramped across his kingdom; at the bidding of the procurator, clerks of servile condition swept bare the palace of its treasures, just as if all had been lawful prize of war. Nor did they even stop there. With incredible stupidity, as well as wickedness, the governor ordered or permitted the widow of Prasutagus, herself daughter as well as spouse of kings, to be beaten with rods, and gave over her two daughters to be violated. The chiefs of the Icenian nation were banished from their ancestral homes, and the kinsmen of the royal family were treated as slaves. At this all the manhood of the nation rose in rebellion; the widowed queen, who is known to posterity as Boadicea,[12] put herself at the head of the maddened confederates (for the Iceni were at once joined by the Trinobantes, possibly also by some of the other neighbouring tribes), and the numbers of the insurgent army are said to have reached 120,000.

Of the long harangue which Dion represents Boadicea as having delivered to her army “from a tribunal made after the Roman fashion of peat-turves,” it is not necessary to quote anything here, as it is obviously but a literary exercise by a Greek rhetorician. The most interesting things which it contains are the description of the grievances endured under the Roman rule, as the rhetorician imagines her to have painted them, and her invocation of the Celtic goddess, Andraste,[13] whom she seems to invoke as the special protectress of her nation. The description which the same author gives of the appearance of the warrior-queen is life-like, and we must hope that it is trustworthy. “Tall in stature, hard-visaged and with fiercest eye: with a rough voice: with an abundance of bright yellow hair reaching down to her girdle: wearing a great collar of gold: with a tunic of divers colours drawn close round her bosom and a thick mantle over it, fastened with a clasp. So she was always dressed, but now she bore a lance in her hand to make her harangue more terrible.”

The first onset of the barbarian army was directed against the hated colony, and thus there were soon a hundred thousand or more enraged Britons howling round, not the walls, but the unwalled enclosure of Camulodunum. Help for the defenceless city there was none or next to none. The four brave legions were far away: one in quarters at Caerleon upon Usk, two fighting with Druids in Anglesey or quartered at Chester, one, the nearest, at Lincoln. The greedy procurator, Catus, when appealed to for help, sent two hundred imperfectly armed soldiers to reinforce the scanty garrison, and then began to arrange for his own speedy flight to Gaul. Within the city there were treachery and the paralysis of despair. No ditch was dug nor even the hastiest rampart reared: the non-combatants, the old men and the women, were not sent away; as passive as if in profound peace they awaited the approach of the multitude of the barbarians. The city was stormed at once: the great temple-citadel, in which the few soldiers were collected, stood a two days’ siege and then likewise fell. Both here and in the two Roman cities which were yet to fall, indescribable horrors of murder, rape, ghastly and insulting mutilations are reported to have been practised by the barbarians. The Ninth legion under its commander (Petillius Cerialis), marching southward to the rescue, was met by the exultant conquerors, routed and almost destroyed. All the foot soldiers perished in the battlefield or in the flight; only Cerialis himself with his cavalry escaped to his former camp and was sheltered behind its fortifications.

Some part of these dismal tidings must have been brought to Suetonius on the shore of the Menai Straits. “With marvellous constancy,” says Tacitus, “he marched through the midst of enemies to Londinium, a place which is not indeed dignified with the name of colony, but which is greatly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the abundance of its supplies.” This is the first mention of London in history. At this time it had not apparently attained anything like the dimensions of which even Roman London could boast in later times. It formed an oblong which measured probably about 800 yards from east to west and 500 from north to south, and covered a little more than 600 acres. The northern boundary was almost certainly the line of Cheapside and Cornhill, the southern that of Upper and Lower Thames Street. The eastern and western frontiers of the city are still obscure, but it is generally admitted that neither St. Paul’s on the west nor the Tower on the east would have been included within it. Such was the little busy city which Suetonius reached at the end of his daring march. He heard there, if he had not heard before, the terrible news of the loss of the Ninth legion. He probably also learned at the same time that the officer in charge of the Second legion, daring to disobey his general’s orders, was lingering at Caerleon, instead of marching to join him in the defence of the eastern portion of the province. The double ill-tidings upset all his plans for the defence of London. His army, which consisted of the Fourteenth legion and a detachment of the Twentieth, amounted only to about 10,000 men; provisions were running short, and the perpetual raids of the enemy made foraging difficult. It was too late to save Verulam, once a British capital, now a Roman municipium, which Boadicea had taken and where the bloody scenes of Camulodunum had been only too faithfully repeated. Now, with a heavy heart, notwithstanding the prayers and the tears of the citizens, Suetonius decided that London also must be left to its fate; by the loss of that one city all the rest of the province might haply be saved. Only this much he could grant, that those of the male inhabitants who could march with his troops might do so. Those whom the weakness of their sex or the weariness of age, or even their attachment to their homes, retained in the city were left, and were soon massacred by the barbarians, who took no captives and had no desire for ransoms, feeling that now was their day of vengeance, and foreboding that that day would be short. The Roman historians compute the loss of life in the three cities at 70,000 persons, by no means all Romans, but including many of British, perhaps also of Gaulish extraction, who in the years of peace had become peaceable and trade-loving subjects of the empire.

The movements of Suetonius, after he had decided to abandon Londinium to its fate, are not clearly indicated by Tacitus, but it seems probable that he retraced his steps northward in order to effect a junction with the troops which he had left at Chester and with the wreck of the Ninth legion still bravely defending itself at Lincoln. Boadicea with her vast horde of exultant Britons was probably hanging on his rear. Battle was inevitable, but the Roman general had some power of choosing the ground, and he chose it in a place protected on each side by the steep hills of a narrow defile and on the rear by a forest. The enemy could only move towards him across the open plain in front and there could be no lurking in ambush. The line was not too long to prevent the legionary soldiers from being drawn up in close ranks; on each side of them were the more lightly armed cohorts of the allies, and the cavalry were massed upon the wings. In great disorderly squadrons the Britons prepared to charge, full of fierce exultation at their past successes and so certain of their impending triumph that they had brought their wives, in waggons drawn up at the farther side of the plain, to behold their victory.

The barbarians came on with loud clamour and menacing war-songs; the Romans awaited them in silence and perfect order till they were within reach of a javelin’s throw. Then at the signal given, raising the battle-cry, they hurled the pilum and rushed at the double against the slow-marching barbarians, broke their ranks, and pierced through the dense mass like a wedge. After a desperate hand-to-hand struggle, the barbarians, whose lack of defensive armour had caused them to suffer terribly from the arrows and the pila of the Romans, fled in disorder before them. The fugitives reached and were stopped by the waggons. The pursuers, maddened probably by the remembrance of the horrors of the sack of the three Roman cities, hewed down not only the fugitive combatants but the women, and even the horses that drew the chariots. So the victory was won. The Romans admitted a loss of some 800 killed and wounded, and claimed to have slaughtered a little less than 80,000 Britons. The apparent accuracy of these words, “a little less,” need not deceive us as to the general untrustworthiness of such estimates as these, but the victory was undoubtedly decisive, and, as such things are reckoned, glorious. Boadicea is said by Tacitus to have ended her life by poison. Dion Cassius, with less probability, says that she died of disease.

Far away in Monmouthshire there was another suicide, the result of this great encounter. “Poenius Postumus, prefect of the camp of the Second legion” (who had presumably held the command in the temporary absence of the legatus), “when he heard how well things had gone with the Fourteenth and the Twentieth, enraged with himself because he had cheated his own legion of like glory, and had, contrary to military rule, disobeyed the orders of his superior, pierced himself through with his own sword.” Possibly he was neither a coward nor a mutineer, but a man suddenly called to assume a crushing load of responsibility in a terrible crisis, who had failed to read aright the signs of the times. The Fourteenth legion, which had borne the greatest part of the work in the suppression of the rebellion, was called, when its officers would stimulate its military pride, the “Tamers of Britain” (Domitores Britanniæ). The renown which it had acquired caused its services to be eagerly sought for in the great game of Cæsar-making which followed upon the death of Nero. It was transferred to Belgic Gaul in A.D. 70, helped to quell the insurrection of Civilis, and never afterwards returned to Britain.

The tenure of office by Suetonius Paulinus was a very short one. He had indeed shown himself

A daring pilot in extremity;

but Nero, who with all his viciousness was not destitute of statesmanlike ability, probably considered that the pilot ought not to have taken his ship into such dangerous channels. After replacing the losses of the Ninth legion by the transfer of some 7,000 soldiers from Germany, the emperor sent a certain Julius Classicianus as successor to the detested procurator Catus. Suetonius seems to have been in favour of stern repression, laying waste with fire and sword the territories of all the tribes of doubtful loyalty. Classicianus, on the other hand, held that the real foe that had now to be fought was famine, especially since the insurgents, intent on the plunder of the Roman warehouses, had neglected the sowing of their spring corn. Differences soon arose between the merciful procurator and the stern legatus. To settle the quarrel Nero sent one of his freedmen, named Polyclitus, who travelled with great pomp and a long train of attendants, burdensome to the provinces through which he passed, but calculated to impress the Roman soldiery with a sense of his importance. The barbarians, on the other hand, who had heard from what a low and servile condition Polyclitus had risen, marvelled that so great a general and so brave an army should tamely submit to the arbitrament of a slave. They profited, however, by that docility; for Polyclitus, though, as his after career showed, not averse from plundering on his own account, made a report to the emperor in favour of the lenient policy of the procurator, and Suetonius, after an eventful lieutenancy of not more than two years, was recalled to Rome (A.D. 61).

In the ten years that followed the recall of Suetonius (A.D. 61–71), years which witnessed the downfall of Nero and the terrible civil war which shook the empire after his death, no great commotion disturbed the much-needed repose of the exhausted province. In the career of Trebellius Maximus, the governor who held nominal power for the greater part of this time, we have a typical instance of the bickerings, sometimes between the civil and military authorities, sometimes, as in this case, between the chief legatus and his military subordinates, which varied the monotony of existence in a conquered province. Tacitus tells us that Trebellius, who was an indolent man, with no experience of camp life, endeavoured to hold the province by mere good nature; a policy not altogether impracticable, because the barbarians had now begun to look more favourably on the pleasant vices of civilisation. The army, however, despised and hated the governor for his avarice and meanness, and their discontent was fomented and forcibly expressed by Roscius Coelius, the legatus of the Twentieth legion. “It is your fault,” said the governor to him, “that discipline is relaxed and the troops are on the verge of mutiny.” “It is yours,” replied Coelius, “that the soldiers are kept poor and defrauded of their pay.” Soon not the legionaries only, but the humbler auxiliaries, dared to hurl their taunts at the governor, who, at last alarmed for his safety, fled to some obscure hiding-place. Drawn out from thence, he prolonged, apparently for a little while, the precarious tenure of his rule; the implied bargain between him and the army being: “To you licence to do as you please; to me unthreatened life”. Then the situation again became desperate. The miserable Trebellius escaped to Germany, took refuge in the camp of the insurgent Emperor Vitellius, did not share his transient success, and never returned to Britain.

When the civil war was ended by the triumph of the strong, sensible, common-place emperor Vespasian, a new impulse was given to Roman conquest in Britain. Petillius Cerialis, a near relative of the new emperor, a capable if somewhat rash soldier, the same who, at the head of the Ninth legion, had vainly sought to stem the torrent of Boadicea’s rebellion, held office for four years (A.D. 71–75), during which time he humbled and perhaps subdued the Brigantes, who ever since Cartimandua’s marital troubles had been more or less at enmity with the empire. This conquest, if really made at this time, involved the addition of Yorkshire to the empire, perhaps the foundation of Eburacum (York), once the capital of Roman Britain. Julius Frontinus (A.D. 75–78) followed Cerialis, and completed the long-delayed subjugation of the Silures in South Wales, who at this time, twenty-four years after Caratacus had been led in triumph through the streets of Rome, were still unreconciled to the Roman dominion. An interesting point in connexion with the name of Julius Frontinus is the fact that nearly twenty years after his return from Britain (A.D. 97) he was appointed by the Emperor Nerva Curator Aquarum, and in that capacity, though he was already advanced in years, carried great reforms and corrected many abuses which had grown up in connexion with the water-supply of the Eternal City. His treatise on the subject is still the source from which we derive almost all our information concerning the splendid aqueducts of Rome.

In the year 78, the Emperor Vespasian appointed as his legatus the most celebrated and probably the greatest of the governors of Britain, Gnæus Julius Agricola. Verging as he was upon his fortieth year he was in the very prime of his matured and disciplined strength. He knew Britain well, having served when quite a young man as tribune (a rank nearly corresponding to our lieutenant) under Suetonius Paulinus, and having probably heard the clamour of the barbarian multitude who crowded round the chariot of Boadicea. Again, ten years later, he had been sent over to Britain to confirm the doubtful loyalty of the Twentieth legion. Since then he had been governor of the important province of Aquitaine, afterwards consul, and he was actually holding the distinguished and well-paid office of Pontifex Maximus when he was appointed to the British command. What was more important for his future fame and for our knowledge of the history of Britain, he had given his daughter in marriage to that master of grave historic style, shot with indignant epigram, Cornelius Tacitus. When the new governor landed in Britain, both soldiers and natives thought that, the summer being now nearly ended, there would be no more fighting that year. Not so, decided Agricola. The Ordovices, dwellers in North Wales, had lately almost destroyed an ala (squadron) of cavalry stationed within their borders. This insolence, it was felt, must be chastised, and the might of Rome speedily displayed by the new legatus, who at once marched against them with a moderate force of legionaries and allies. The Ordovices refused to descend into the plain and fight there on equal terms. Agricola having climbed the hills of Denbighshire at the head of his troops, defeated and all but destroyed that clan of mountaineers. He looked westwards to the sacred Isle of Anglesey, once conquered by his old general Suetonius, but almost immediately abandoned on account of the terrible tidings from Camulodunum. He had no ships in which to cross the Menai Straits, but he had among his auxiliary troops men, probably from the mouths of the Rhine and the Waal, expert swimmers and skilled in finding possible fords, and these men laying aside the cumbrous loads which the Roman soldier was accustomed to carry, dashed into the stream, appeared on the shore of Mona and received the submission of the surprised and terrified islanders, who thought that till ships appeared in the straits they at least were safe from conquest. Having thus displayed his power, the governor now set himself to win the hearts of the natives by reforms in the administration, especially the financial administration, and redress of grievances. The burdens which rested upon the provincials of Britain were of two kinds, the tributum and the annona: the former a payment in money which was, it may be presumed, remitted by the revenue officers direct to Rome; the latter a payment in kind of the various stores needed for the sustenance of the army—fodder, lard, fish, firewood, but pre-eminently corn; and these things would of course not be sent out of the country but consumed in the various camps and cities where the soldiers were quartered. There was some good work to be done by Agricola in equalising the assessments to tributum, or rendering them proportionate to the ability of the British town or village responsible for its payment. But the chief abuses seem to have arisen in connexion with the annona. Fraudulent revenue officers would probably contract for the harvest on low terms before it was reaped, would gather it into the granaries, close the doors and laugh in the faces of the unhappy natives who were ordered to furnish so many bushels of corn and could only comply with the order by buying it from them at their own extortionate price. Then they would purposely fix the place where the annona had to be delivered, as far off as possible, in districts traversed by the poorest of roads. All these various abuses were, we are told, at once removed or greatly mitigated by the firm hand of Agricola.

It was not enough to remove causes of complaint. He would also win over the natives to positive affection for the Roman rule. He was constantly urging all the wealthier Britons to come into the towns and to take part in building operations. Everywhere temples, market-places, well-built houses were rising, reared by British natives, and pledges for their future loyalty. He gathered round him the sons of the chiefs, had them instructed in liberal arts, praised their aptness to learn at the expense of their Gaulish contemporaries, listened before long to eloquent declamations, delivered, of course, in the Latin tongue, by young Britons, gracefully clad in the Roman toga. The bath and the luxurious banquet offered their attractions not in vain to the late hunter of the forests, and as Tacitus sarcastically observes “the simple folk called that civilisation (humanitas) which was really the beginning of slavery”.

The summer of A.D. 79, the second year of Agricola’s command, seems to have been chiefly occupied in measures for completing the military occupation of the recently conquered territory, that is, probably, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Northumberland, the country of the Brigantes. “He himself chose the site of the camps; he himself reconnoitred the forests and the estuaries” (probably of the Tees, the Wear and the Tyne, and perhaps also Solway Firth), “and meanwhile he gave the enemy no rest, but was for ever harassing them by sudden excursions, and when he had terrified them sufficiently, then by holding his hand he gave them an inducement to desire peace. In consequence hereof many native states which up to that time had treated the empire on a footing of equality now gave hostages and laid aside their animosity. They found themselves surrounded with forts and garrisons, and all was done with so much science and system as had never before been applied to any newly conquered part of Britain.” It is possible that Eburacum, which at this time, or very soon after, became the headquarters of the Ninth legion, was one of the strong places thus founded or fortified by Agricola.

The record of the year 80, the third year of Agricola’s command, is one of the most interesting to all north-country Englishmen, but it is unfortunately also one of the most obscure. It will be well to quote the words of Tacitus as they stand, without attempting conjectural amplification. “The third year of expeditions opened up to us new tribes, all the nations up to the estuary called Tanaus having their lands laid waste. The enemy cowed by these operations did not dare to harass the army, though it was buffeted by fierce tempests, and thus a respite was afforded which was employed in building more forts. It was observed by military experts that no general ever showed greater ability in his choice of suitable sites for such defences. No fort founded by Agricola was ever stormed by hostile violence, or surrendered, or abandoned by its fugitive garrison: yet frequent sallies were made from them, for they were fortified against a tedious siege by a yearly renewed stock of provisions. This gave the defenders courage for the winter; each garrison relied on itself for its safety, and the enemy were driven to despair by the uselessness of their attacks. For aforetime they had been wont to recoup themselves for the losses of the summer by the successes of winter, but now they found themselves repelled in both seasons alike.” We have here evidently to deal with an extensive system of fortification; but we are provoked by being unable precisely to identify the region in which it took place. What is the meaning of the estuary called Tanaus “up to which Agricola ravaged the land”? It is certainly not the Tay (which was indicated by the corrupt reading Taum); it may be the Firth of Forth; only that estuary is immediately after called Bodotria. The little Scottish river Tyne near North Berwick has a kind of estuary, and Mommsen’s conjecture that this is the Tanaus of Tacitus would have much probability, were it not so near to the far mightier estuary of the Forth that it is difficult to imagine any one choosing it as a landmark. The better known Tyne of Newcastle would be clearly the strongest claimant if the course of the narrative did not seem to have already carried us to the north of it. No piece of water would meet the geographical condition better than the splendid estuary of the Tweed, so well fitted by nature for a limitary stream, but no other passage of any author has been found in which any name resembling Tanaus has been applied to that river. In the next year (A.D. 81) Agricola undoubtedly reached and fortified the narrow neck of land between Clyde and Forth (Clota and Bodotria); but the point practically at issue is this: “May we understand that we have in this passage of Tacitus a description of the building by Agricola of some at least of the forts between Tyne and Solway on the line which was afterwards marked by the Roman wall?” It has been often suggested, and in the opinion of the present writer with some probability, that we may. In that case great additional interest attaches to Chesters, Housesteads and others of the ruined Roman stations in Northumberland, when we think that they may have been planned by the exceptional military genius of Agricola.

With the three remaining campaigns of this general (A.D. 82–84) we have no special concern, as they were all fought beyond the limits of England. We must not follow him as he cruises about the Kyles of Bute and the Mull of Cantire, gazes across to Ireland (an island, Tacitus thinks, with better harbours and more frequented by merchants than England), nor discuss his opinion, often expressed to his son-in-law, that with one legion and a moderate supply of auxiliaries he could have added Hibernia to the empire. Nor must we linger over Tacitus’ celebrated description of the great fight on the Mons Graupius,[14] and the spirited war-speech of the Caledonian hero Galgacus, which according to Tacitus preceded the encounter. Almost immediately after this victory—perhaps more dearly bought and less decisive than would appear on the surface of the Tacitean narrative—Agricola, whose term of command was already of exceptional length, was recalled to Rome. The Emperor Domitian’s jealousy of a soldier whose admiring legions might insist on proclaiming him as a candidate for the empire, may have been, as Tacitus suggests, the sole reason for his recall; but nearer danger was also threatening Rome from the region of the Danube, and, as Mommsen has pointed out, one of the British legions was actually recalled for service in Pannonia. True statesmanship as well as mean personal jealousy may have prompted the recall of so adventurous a general from the scene of his triumphs. Agricola made no attempt to resist his supersession, but returned to Rome, lived there as a private but harassed citizen, declining the governorship of Syria (which was offered to him with a hint that it would be dangerous to accept it), and died at Rome in the fifty-fourth year of his age on August 23, A.D. 93. The suggestions of foul play and of poison stealthily administered by order of Domitian are mentioned, but hardly endorsed, even by the suspicious pen of his son-in-law. That son-in-law was absent from Rome at the time of his death, but describes the deathbed scene from the reports of the bystanders; and his farewell to the departed spirit of the beloved one, the celebrated peroration of the Life of Agricola, is one of the most beautiful things in Roman literature.

CHAPTER V.
THE ROMAN OCCUPATION.

With the departure of Agricola the literary history of Roman Britain comes to an end. For three centuries longer the legions were to remain in our island, and the buildings which they reared, the altars which they inscribed, the roads which they constructed, tell us something of the life which they led during that long space of time, as long as the whole period that has elapsed from Elizabeth’s days to ours. Archæology has much to tell us concerning it, but history is almost altogether silent. A few sections of Dion Cassius, some confused notices in the Historia Augusta, a page or two of Ammianus Marcellinus, are practically all that is left to us of the written history of our country from Agricola to Stilicho. We need not here discuss the causes of a silence so tantalising and so irremediable; how far it may have sprung from Roman contempt of a distant and mist-enveloped island, how far from a decay of courage and hopefulness in the Romans themselves, symptoms of the impending ruin of their empire; it is enough that the pages are for us left blank and can now never be filled.

The greatest monument of Roman power in Britain and that which has yielded the most fruitful results to archæology is the Roman Wall between the two estuaries of Tyne and Solway. Almost all that we know of Roman life in Britain during the second century centres round this one great work. Towards the end of the first century a change took place in the organisation of the defence of the empire on the frontiers. Hitherto the republic, and after it the empire, had been satisfied to keep a strong body of troops in all the imperfectly conquered provinces, and to plant well-garrisoned castles near the river or the range of mountains on the other side of which were the barbarians of Europe or Africa, or the hostile monarchies of Asia. Soon after the death of Nero a different system was adopted, involving the formation of a definitely marked boundary which when not protected by very strong natural barriers was guarded by an actual wall of stone or earth upon which the garrisoned fortresses were strung, like beads on a chain. Not only in Britain are traces of these limiting walls to be found, but also in Germany, between the Lower Rhine and the Danube, and in the Dobrudscha on the western shore of the Black Sea: and there is reason to believe that a similar wall of defence shut out the barbarians of Mount Aures who threatened the provincials of Roman Africa.

“The real authors of the frontier system were the Flavian and Antonine Emperors, and the period extending from the accession of Vespasian to the death of Marcus Aurelius, or, roughly, from 70 A.D. to 180 A.D., witnessed its complete organisation. The interest of these emperors in the matter was no doubt quickened by the growing anxiety, an anxiety unknown to the Augustan age, but perceptible in Tacitus, as to the increasing pressure from without upon the empire.... It is well for students of the British frontier to remember that the emperor with whose name the organisation of the imperial frontier system is most closely connected is Hadrian.”[15]

There has been much discussion about this matter. As we shall see, there is good reason for connecting the name of a later emperor, Severus, with the building of the wall, but, on the whole, the testimony of inscriptions and the labours of archæologists tend to confirm the clear statement of the biographer Spartianus (writing, it is true, a century and a half after the event): “Hadrian visited Britain, in which island he corrected many things that were amiss, and was the first to draw a wall across for eighty miles, in order to divide the barbarians and the Romans”. In all the long list of Roman emperors it would be hard to find a more fascinating figure than that of this great wall-builder. By no means the best of his class, far surpassed in moral excellence by Trajan, Antoninus and Marcus, but removed by an immeasurable distance from the worst, from such men as Nero, Domitian and Commodus; architect, artist, author, and, above all things, indefatigable traveller, Publius Ælius Hadrianus united a truly Greek versatility and brilliancy of intellect to all the Roman’s strong sense of duty towards the great Res Publica, and willingness for Rome’s sake to sacrifice many of the sensual gratifications in which his soul only too clearly delighted. The traveller who wanders for hours through the ruins of the vast collection of luxurious palaces which is called the Villa Hadriani, or who, in sunny Athens, sees the arch which bears the proud inscription, “On this side the city of Theseus, on that the city of Hadrian,” can in some measure realise the self-denial which must have been involved in Hadrian’s presence with the legions during the setting out of eighty Roman miles of wall[16] across the misty moors of Northumberland and Cumberland.

It was probably in the year 120, three years after his accession to the empire, that Hadrian visited Britain. The journey may have been only part of his pre-arranged tour through the western portion of his dominions, but it is also possible that it was the result of some recent and special disaster in Britain to the Roman arms. Some forty or fifty years afterwards the orator Fronto alluded to “the great number of soldiers slain by the Britons during the reign of Hadrian,” and it is allowable at least as a matter of conjecture to couple these words with the ominous disappearance of one of the legions stationed in Britain from the army list of the empire. The unlucky Ninth legion, once quartered at Lincoln, afterwards at York, had been, as we have seen, nearly destroyed in the insurrection headed by Boadicea. It had again suffered most severely, under Agricola, from a night attack made by the Caledonians before the battle of Mons Graupius. And now, just about this time, either in the later years of Trajan or the earlier years of Hadrian, it vanishes clean out of the lists of the Roman army and is replaced by the Sixth legion, surnamed the Victorious, which was brought over to Britain and stationed at Eburacum. There is some discussion as to the earlier cantonment of the legions, whether four or three, that had been quartered in Britain, but as to the general question of their allocation during, at least, the second and third centuries of our era there can be no doubt. The Second legion (Augusta) at Isca (Caerleon-upon-Usk); the Sixth (Victrix) at Eburacum (York), and the Twentieth (Valeria Victrix) at Deva (Chester), have left abundant tokens of their long-continued presence.

From all these legions, however, considerable drafts were taken to assist in the building of the wall from Tyne to Solway, the existing remains of which must now be described. At the two ends of its course, where it has had the ill-fortune either to meet with the fierce industrial energy of the dwellers by the estuary of the Tyne, or to attract the envious glances of the farmers of fertile Cumberland, the wall has practically ceased to exist, though it has seldom passed that way for more than two or three miles without leaving some traces, however faint, of its presence to reward the quest of the earnest antiquary. But in the central part of its course, where it has left the busy haunts of men and climbed the bleak moorlands and the steep basaltic cliffs of Western Northumberland and Eastern Cumberland, it still exists in what its great historian, Dr. Bruce, used to call “an encouraging state of preservation”. For twenty miles or more it goes striding over mountain and moor, religiously climbing every cliff and dipping down into every hollow of the sharply outlined, serrated, whinstone range. Sometimes we see only the rough rubble-work which formed the core of the wall, but more often the well-hewn square blocks which faced its northern and southern sides are still visible. The height attained by it is in one or two places as much as nine feet, but its more usual altitude is four to five feet. It was probably when perfect about seventeen feet high; and its width, as we know from the existing remains, varied from six to eight feet. The line of the wall once fixed, its builders seem to have pursued a nearly uniform plan, regardless of the help which they might have derived from natural defences. Thus in one place it crowns the heights of some steep basaltic cliffs at whose feet lies a small Northumbrian lake. No desperation of bravery would ever have caused a Brigantian chief to dash across that lake and climb those pinnacles of columnar basalt: still even here the wall pursues its undeviating course, and, so far as we know, retained its undiminished height. It is possible, however, that in such a case as this it was meant as a defence, not against barbarians, but against the weather. Snowstorms sometimes sweep violently across these bleak moorlands, and it may have been thought desirable to provide the Roman sentinel, pacing backwards and forwards between camp and camp, with some shelter from their fury.

Along the line of the wall are situated fortified enclosures of three kinds which now go by the names of camps, mile-castles and turrets. The camps, of which there were seventeen, between Tyne and Solway, and which were probably called by the Romans Prætenturæ or Stationes, vary in size from three to six acres. They were destined for the housing of one cohort—a body of men varying in size from 600 to 1,000—with, no doubt, a certain number of camp-followers, and in some cases a considerable troop of horses. Public buildings, known by antiquaries as the prætorium, the forum and the like, are to be found generally in the centre of the camp, sometimes on the side most exposed to the enemy’s attacks: and the quarters of the officers may generally be distinguished from those of the common soldiers by the elaborate arrangements for warming them, known as hypocausts. In these the floor of the room is supported on ranges of short pillars (generally about eight or nine inches high), between which the hot air circulated, being brought by flues from the furnace at a corner of the camp, in which it is evident that the fuel used was often the coal of Northumberland. The great number of oyster-shells, the beef-bones and mutton-bones found near many of the camps give us an indication of the food supplied to the officers, perhaps also to some of the privates. Many interesting illustrations of the immense length of time that the Roman occupation of Britain endured may be derived from these Prætenturæ. Thus we have several inscriptions recording the repair of a granary or a temple ruined by age (vetustate conlapsum): and in the sacred well of the nymph Coventina, just outside the camp of Procolitia, there were found 16,000 coins ranging over a period from A.D. 100 to 300 which had been thrown into the well by generations of Roman soldiers as votive offerings to the goddess.

Besides the larger camps, there were, as has been said, also smaller forts, erected at regular intervals of a thousand Roman paces, which are now known by the designation mile-castles; and other still smaller enclosures, hardly more than sentry boxes, about three to the mile, which are called, not very aptly, turrets, and of which very few specimens still remain.

The soldiers by whom the line of the wall was defended did not belong to the legions, though legionaries had been employed in its construction. They belonged to various auxiliary corps recruited in the outlying provinces of the empire, and they were theoretically less Roman, less Italian, than their comrades enlisted in the legions, though this distinction was practically to a large extent breaking down in the second and third centuries of the empire. While Britons were being enlisted for service abroad, Asturians from Spain, Frisians and Batavians from Holland, Tungrians from Belgium, Lingones from Gaul, even Dalmatians and Dacians from the distant provinces which bore their names, were tramping from station to station along the mighty wall of Hadrian, bathing in the chilly waters of the Tyne, or hunting the deer on the misty slopes of Cross Fell. Most gladly would we learn how these detachments of soldiers, which for something like three centuries guarded the British Limes Imperii, were recruited; whether fresh drafts came, for instance, from Spain and from Dalmatia to replace the veterans who had earned their discharge, or whether the sons of the barracks kept the barracks full, in which case there would be probably an ever-increasing strain of British blood in the limitary garrisons. But on this point we lack definite information, which may possibly be supplied to us by the spade and the pick-axe of future excavators.

The total number of actual soldiers on the line of the wall has been computed at 10,000. In addition to these there would undoubtedly be a certain number of domestic servants, grooms, camp-followers of various kinds, besides the wives and concubines of the soldiers, so that we may probably conjecture the population of the Limes at not less than 20,000, a much larger number of persons than is to be found in that beautiful but solitary region to-day. Not only the numbers but the nationality of these vanished dwellers by the Tyne and Irthing strike us by their strange contrast with the present. Besides the Asturian and Dalmatian soldiers there must have been merchants and money-lenders and camp-followers of all kinds, speaking many tongues, upon these wind-swept moorlands. In the museum at South Shields is a sepulchral monument representing a woman seated, holding in her right hand a jewel-box, in her left implements of needlework. Underneath is a bilingual inscription, telling us in Latin that the figure represents “Regina, freedwoman and wife of Barate the Palmyrene, herself of the [British] nation of the Catuallauni, who died at the age of thirty”. In characters akin to Hebrew the Oriental part of the inscription says simply, “Regina, the freedwoman of Barate. Alas!” The blended nationality, the British girl bought, enfranchised, loved and too soon lost by the Syrian,—merchant perchance or usurer,—who followed the flight of the eagles of Rome, are all brought before us by these few roughly carved lines, and they tell a story of world-wide empire, in which, perhaps, the Britain of our own day could offer the closest parallel to Rome.

Under the Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161), the successor of Hadrian, another wall was built, some fifty or sixty miles north of the first, between the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. There were no stones in this wall, which was made of layers of turf, and, moreover, it has suffered cruelly (from an archæological point of view) through the operations necessary first for the cutting of a canal and afterwards for the building of a railroad between the two seas; but an abundance of inscribed stones tell us much concerning the names and occupations of the soldiers by whom it was garrisoned, and abundantly confirm the testimony of historians who attribute its erection to Antoninus Pius (138–161), one of the best and noblest of Roman emperors. Doubtless, at the time of its building, the country between the two walls (comprising the county of Northumberland and the whole south of Scotland) was subject to Roman rule. The precise period when that district was finally lost to the empire is still unknown to us. The philosopher emperor, Marcus Aurelius (161–180), was closely occupied with the defence of the empire against the barbarians of the Middle Danube, and his name is scarcely mentioned in connexion with the history of Britain. We are told, however, that “the Britannic war pressed heavily on his mind,” and that he sent a second Agricola to settle it. This general of Marcus, Calpurnius Agricola, was not, as far as we know, descended from his great namesake, the general of Domitian.

With the accession of Commodus (180–192), son of Marcus, the long and glorious period of the patriot emperors came to an end, and the ruin of the empire began. The foolish and headstrong boy, who was now lord of the Roman world, sacrificed some of the best generals in his service to his jealous and cowardly suspicions, and while he was devoting himself to the bloody pastimes of the amphitheatre, allowed the necessary work of the defence of the frontier to fall behind. “The tribes in the island of Britain,” we are told by Dion Cassius, “over-passed the wall which separated them from the Roman armies, committed widespread ravages, and cut to pieces a Roman general with the troops under his command.” Which of the two walls is here referred to is not easy to say. It may be conjectured, however, that the wall of Antoninus had been already broken down in the reign of Marcus, during the “heavily pressing” Britannic war, and that we have here a description of one of those barbaric demolitions of which we find such abundant traces in the wall of Hadrian. To chastise the barbarians and to restore the broken Limes Commodus sent probably his best general, the sturdy old soldier, Ulpius Marcellus. If discipline were relaxed in the legions on the British frontier, here was certainly the man to restore it. St. Paul himself was not more resolute to “buffet his body and bring it into subjection” than this chief of many legions. A scanty sleeper himself, he framed ingenious plans to keep his centurions and officers at night harassed and awake. An old man with toothless and tender gums, he would eat only the stale hard bread which he had brought from Rome, in order that he might not fall into gluttony and excess. Such was the man who restored for a time the honour of the Roman arms, and who chastised the barbarians so thoroughly that all men marvelled that he was not, on his return to Rome, condemned to death by the jealous Commodus.

The assassination of Commodus (192), followed in less than three months by the murder of his excellent successor, Pertinax, and by the sale of the imperial dignity to the highest bidder, introduced a dreadful period of civil war in which the whole empire had nearly fallen asunder in ruin. Of the three candidates for the purple, Pescennius Niger in Syria, Albinus in Britain, and Septimius Severus on the Middle Danube, Severus, who had the advantage of being nearest to the capital and was therefore first acclaimed as emperor, was also at last the victorious one, but he had a hard fight, especially with Albinus, who led the three legions which still composed the army of Britain to a bloody battle in the plains of Lyons. The confusion of the times and the absence of the Roman legions were undoubtedly favourable to the restless barbarians. The wall of Hadrian was broken through; the Mæatæ, who lived immediately to the north of it, burst into the province, and the governor, Virius Lupus, purchased a precarious peace by paying a large sum to the invaders. It may be easily imagined that the condition of Britain after such an ignominious conclusion of a campaign, and even after the return of the disaffected legions of Albinus, was far from satisfactory, but it was apparently not till 208 that Septimius Severus set forth from Rome to bring the affairs of the province into order. He was already more than sixty years of age, his joints were racked by gout and his heart was sore through the fierce dissensions of his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, and the evils which these foreboded for the empire. Yet even these dissensions urged him the more to undertake the expedition, for he hoped that common labours and common dangers might in some degree tend to draw the two hostile brothers together, and that the necessary hardships of a camp life under our northern skies might restore some of the moral tone which had been lost amid the vicious indulgences of Rome. In this hope, it is true, he was completely disappointed. The hatred of Caracalla, especially for his brother, waxed fiercer and fiercer, and included also his father, for whose death he longed with scarcely concealed eagerness. Borne in his litter, on account of his sufferings from gout, the brave old soldier traversed the greater part of Caledonia, hewing down forests and throwing causeways across marshes; slaying, of course, multitudes of barbarians, but losing also 50,000 of his own troops (so we are told, but the estimate is probably exaggerated) by hostile ambuscades, severities of weather, even by the swords of his own soldiers, who often killed their own comrades to prevent their falling into the hands of the barbarians. He had a mind, too, to explore the secrets of Nature, and compared with wonder the all-but perpetual day of midsummer and the scanty measure of light at midwinter in northern Scotland.

The dates of Severus’ campaign are only obscurely indicated, but it seems probable that by the year 210 the subjection of the Caledonians had been apparently completed. Severus, accompanied by Caracalla and his staff, was riding on horseback, notwithstanding his physical infirmity, towards a certain place of meeting which had been appointed for the barbarians, that they might surrender their swords and swear fidelity to the empire. Caracalla, riding behind him, drew his sword and made his horse rear and prance, intending, apparently, to be brought into collision with his father and thus to kill him by apparent misadventure. A warning shout from some member of the staff caused the emperor to look round and the parricidal design was foiled. Severus said nothing, but rode calmly on, took his place on the tribunal and went through the ceremony that had been arranged. He then sent for his son and two of his chief ministers (one of them the great lawyer Papinian), having ordered that a naked sword should be placed in the middle of the tent. He sternly rebuked his son for the impious deed which he had meditated in the sight of the allies and the enemies of Rome, and then, changing his tone, said: “If you still desire to slay me, here is the sword, draw it and destroy me. Or, since I have associated you with me in the empire, give your orders to Papinian and let him be my executioner. You are young and strong: I am old and shall lay me down to rest without a sigh.” The invitation was not accepted, for Caracalla shrank now from the guilt of manifest parricide. But the father’s words revealed too plainly the bitterness of his soul. Many cruelties and much needless bloodshed had marked his own ascent to power, but they were surely all avenged by the misery of that day in the land of the Caledonians.

It was possibly in this same year 210, at any rate during his stay in Britain, that Severus completed a great and necessary work—the repair of the wall of Hadrian. So grievously had this long barrier suffered at the hands of the barbarians that reconstruction seemed to the soldiers engaged in it like an actual fresh construction. It is only thus that we can explain the language of the careless, inaccurate authors of the Historia Augusta, who, forgetful apparently of the fact that they have already assigned the credit of the work to Hadrian, now say of Severus: “The greatest glory of his reign is that he fortified Britain by a wall drawn across the island and ending on both sides with the ocean, for which achievement he received the name of Britannicus”. Attempts have been made to explain the apparent discrepancy between the two accounts by assigning part of the fortification to Hadrian and part to Severus—for instance, the earthen mounds to the former and the stone wall to the latter; but a careful study of the existing remains does not favour these theories. It seems better to admit that the writer was careless and forgetful, and that British affairs and the story of the Roman wall were of infinitely less importance to him than they are now to us, dwellers in Britain.

Severus was doomed to discover, like Edward Plantagenet a thousand years later, how deceptive were victories over the Northern mountaineers. Next year (211) the Mæatæ were again up in arms and were joined by the Caledonians. Filled with wrath he ordered his troops again to invade their land, repeating often the lines of Homer:—

Let not one of the race escape the steepness of ruin,

None, your avenging hands, not e’en the babe at the bosom.

He was preparing himself once more to set forth in his litter in the short dark winter days for the northern moorlands, when sickness attacked him, aided, some men thought, by Caracalla and the physicians, and on February 4, 211, the old man died at Eburacum. He had lived sixty-five years and reigned seventeen, and he was the last Roman emperor of whose doings in our land we have any detailed description. Scarcely had Severus died when his sons, renouncing apparently all thoughts of vengeance on the Caledonians, left the wintry north and returned to the delights of Rome. The hardly suppressed enmity of the brothers now broke out into open flame; and after various ineffectual attempts, always foiled by the younger man’s vigilance, Caracalla’s centurions slew Geta in his mother’s arms. Wheresoever the name of his victim occurred on the monuments, it was erased by order of the murderer. This strange manifestation of posthumous vindictiveness has left traces in our own country (for instance on a monument in the abbey-church of Hexham) as well as on the Arch of Severus in Rome, and in an inscription near the Second Cataract of the Nile.

Caracalla himself was assassinated in 217, but emperors of his kindred wore the imperial purple down to the year 235, and thus the dynasty of Severus may be said to have lasted for more than forty years. Both in coins and inscriptions the princes of this house have left an exceptionally full record in the British province. From 235, the date of the murder of Severus Alexander (an excellent young emperor, last of his line), down to 284, a period of almost half a century, the Roman empire was in a state of absolute disintegration. The barbarians were pressing fiercely on its frontiers. This was the era of the first and terrible invasion of the Goths (244–270), an invasion which after awful losses on both sides, and the death of a Roman emperor from the pestilence caused by the war, ended in the abandonment to the barbarians of the great province of Dacia, won for the empire by the victories of Trajan. It was the era, too, of a most humiliating defeat by the Persians, and the conversion of a Roman emperor into a footstool for the Persian king. But more dangerous, if possible, than the external foes of the empire, was its internal disorganisation. In these forty-nine years no fewer than fifteen emperors were recognised at Rome, besides a multitude of obscure competitors (commonly known as the thirty tyrants) in the provinces. It is needless to say that the reigns, which thus lasted on an average little more than three years, were generally terminated by mutiny and murder; needless to dilate on the miserable collapse of law and order which inevitably followed from such continual changes in the depositary of supreme power in the state. Of this dismal period there is, naturally enough, no written record in the annals of Britain. Undoubtedly the wave of Roman influence ebbed; we can hardly be wrong in thinking that now, at any rate, if not before, the country between the two walls was permanently abandoned to the barbarians. The Northumbrian camps were probably also sacked, and we may, if we will, read some pages of that long unwritten chapter in the ruined walls of the camps erected by Hadrian and Severus, in the places where fire has evidently passed upon the corridors of a Roman villa, destroying the elaborate bathing arrangements of tribune or centurion.

For the empire as a whole this interregnum of anarchy came to an end in the year 284 when Diocletian, the second Augustus, ascended the throne. This man, of obscure, even of servile origin, showed statesmanship of a rare order, rescuing the water-logged and all-but foundering vessel of the state from destruction, and steering it into a harbour in which it rode safely for a hundred years. His chief expedient was the division of the imperial power, in recognition of the fact that the vast fabric of the empire could no longer be upheld by a single ruler, and that if the supreme Augustus would not have rivals he must have partners. Dividing the empire into four great sections called prefectures, he chose for himself the prefecture of the East, including Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Thrace. His contemporary and colleague, the stout old soldier Maximian, who, like himself, bore the title of Augustus, ruled Italy, southern Germany and the greater part of Roman Africa. After Diocletian had reigned seven years he associated with himself in addition two junior partners, not Augusti but merely Cæsars; Galerius who governed the Illyrian lands, which in the meaning then given to the name stretched from Cape Matapan to the Danube. To the youngest of all, Constantius Chlorus, was assigned the prefecture of the west, stretching from Tangier to Hexham, and including three great “Dioceses” as the divisions intermediate between prefectures and provinces were called: Western Africa and Spain, Gaul and Britain. A noble portion was this, for the junior partner of the imperial firm, and one which might have satisfied the ambition even of a Napoleon. But there was one annoying drawback to the greatness of the western Cæsar. After all the rest of the empire had been restored to tranquillity the island of Britain still remained outside the imperial orbit, and what made this circumstance the more exasperating was the remembrance that it was due to the treachery of an officer chosen by the emperors themselves. Desiring to check the piratical expeditions of the Franks and Saxons who were already beginning to infest both coasts of the British channel, Maximian, who was at that time ruling and warring in Gaul, had entrusted the command of a naval squadron to a certain Carausius, a man of mean extraction, born either in Flanders or Ireland,[17] who had already distinguished himself by his bravery and his skill in naval warfare. From his strong place of arms at Gesoriacum (Boulogne), Carausius soon made his power felt by the barbarians, but before long Maximian had reason to suspect that the officer of the empire was himself in secret league with at least some of the pirates and shared their plunder. He summoned Carausius to appear before him, but that astute personage, suspecting the motive for the summons, hastily quitted Boulogne and sailed for Britain, which in the disorganised condition of Roman affairs he had not much difficulty in making his own.

Having declared himself emperor and having even constrained the two legitimate Augusti to recognise him as a quasi-partner of their dignity, Carausius actually succeeded in maintaining his position for six years (287–293), perhaps the only time in the history of our island when there has been a veritable “Emperor of Britain”. Of the character of his government we have unfortunately no information except some sentences of invective from professional rhetoricians; but at least the numismatist has reason to remember his reign which has supplied our museums with a multitude of coins. In these, while the obverse represents the head of the self-made emperor, a middle-aged common-place man who looks like a self-made manufacturer, the reverse bears sometimes the well-known Roman emblems of the wolf and the twins; or a lion with a thunderbolt in his mouth symbolises the valour of Augustus; or a female milking a cow the fertility of his kingdom; while in some of them the association with Jovius and Herculius (the titles of the two legitimate Augusti) attests his share in the imperial partnership.

Notwithstanding this interchange of compliments it was felt at headquarters that it was time that this separatist empire should come to an end, and it was in fact chiefly to accomplish this that Constantius had been created Cæsar of the west. The history of the campaign has to be gathered with difficulty from the rhetoric of Mamertinus and Eumenius, two professional panegyrists of the conqueror, but we seem to perceive that Carausius or his pirate allies still held the harbour of Boulogne, and that it was necessary to seal up the channel with beams of timber and cargoes of stone to prevent their exit. Stormy weather then delayed for some time the operations of Constantius, and meanwhile Carausius had been assassinated by one of his officers named Allectus, who at once assumed the purple and struck coins describing himself as Pious, Fortunate and August.

For nearly three years Allectus reigned. At last, in 296, Constantius set forth for the overthrow of this new usurper. “Other emperors,” cries his flatterer, “have received the credit of victories won under their auspices though they themselves were tarrying in Rome. You, unconquered Cæsar! put yourself at the head of your troops; you gave the signal to start, when sea and sky were alike turbid, notwithstanding the hesitation of the other leaders. The wind struck obliquely on your sail: you made your vessel tack. All the soldiers, enraptured, cried: ‘Let us follow Cæsar wherever he leads us’. Fortune did indeed favour you. We have heard from the companions of your voyage how the mists hung low over the back of the sea so that the hostile fleet stationed in ambush round the Isle of Wight never saw you pass. As soon as they touched the shore of Britain your unconquered army set fire to all their ships, urged surely, by some warning voice of your divinity, to seek their safety only in fight and victory.” And so, with more of these pompous periods, the orator describes how the usurper Allectus fled as soon as he saw the imperial fleet, and fleeing fell into the hands of the soldiers of Constantius, how half dead with terror he thus hastened to his death, and by his neglect of all military precautions handed over an easy victory to the imperial troops. “Scarcely one Roman was killed while all the hills and plains around were covered with the ugly bodies of the slain. Those dresses worn in barbarian fashion, those locks of bright red hue were now all defiled with dust and gore. That standard bearer of rebellion himself [Allectus], having in the hope of concealment stripped off the purple robe which he had degraded by wearing it, now lay with scarce a rag to cover his nakedness.”[18] The orator then goes on to describe in words of turgid obscurity how some of the soldiers of Constantius, parted from the main body of the fleet in the fog which had baffled the look-out of Allectus, wandered to the “oppidum Londiniense,” and there were fortunate enough to meet and defeat the remains of the “mercenary multitude” of the usurper’s forces which had taken refuge in that town. We thank even the bombastic orator for some slight indication of what was passing in the streets of the little Roman London at the end of the third century.

It was, as we have seen, in the year 296 that Britain was recovered for the empire by Constantius. Ten years afterwards that emperor, in failing health and knowing that he had not long to live, was looking anxiously eastwards for the arrival of his favourite son, the offspring of his concubine Helena, the brave and brilliant soldier Constantine. Diocletian and Maximian had both abdicated the empire. Constantius Chlorus was now raised from the rank of Cæsar to the higher rank of Augustus, but he shared that dignity with a jealous colleague, Galerius, who had been allowed to name the two new Cæsars. Of those two junior partners Constantine was not one. Worse than that, he was retained as a kind of hostage at the Bithynian palace of Galerius, and it was doubtful whether father and son would ever be allowed to meet again. But in a moment of irresolution or of alarm Galerius gave the desired permission, and Constantine, not risking the chance of its withdrawal, departed from the court without formal leave-taking and hurried across Europe to Boulogne where his father was then residing. It was currently reported two centuries later that in order to prevent the possibility of pursuit he ordered the post-horses at each imperial mutatio, which he did not himself require, to be either killed or so mutilated as to make them unfit for travel. Gibbon derides this “very foolish story,” but it is not easy to understand why, if untrue, it should have obtained such general acceptance.

However this may be, it is certain that Constantine arrived safely at his father’s headquarters at Boulogne, shared with him the labours of a short campaign against the Picts, and was present in his chamber, in the Prætorian palace at Eburacum, when, worn out with toil and disease, Constantius Chlorus breathed his last (July 25, 306). His own elevation to the imperial dignity by the soldiers, who enthusiastically hailed him as Augustus, followed immediately after, and we may fairly suppose that the same place which had witnessed the death of the father witnessed also the accession of the son. He speedily quitted Britain in order to take part in that desperate game of empire, with partners constantly changing and occasionally putting one another to death, from which after eighteen years he finally arose sole emperor. With all this later life of his, with his adoption of Christianity, with his choice of a new capital by the Bosphorus, with his convocation of the Nicene council, we have here no concern; but it is worth while to emphasise the fact that a reign so immensely important for all the after-history of Europe and of the world began in our island by the slow, wide-wandering river Ouse. Thus in a certain sense York is the mother-city of Constantinople.

We come now to another blank half century in the history of Roman Britain. Save for an obscure hint of the presence of the Emperor Constans, son of Constantine, at some time between 337 and 350, we have scarcely any information as to British affairs from the proclamation of Constantine in 306 to the despatch of the elder Theodosius to Britain in 367. This general, father of the more celebrated emperor of the same name, was sent by the Emperor Valentinian to restore some degree of order in the unhappy island, which had suffered from rapacious governors, from accusations of disloyalty cruelly avenged, and more recently from bloody inroads of the Picts and Scots with whom were now joined a tribe who are called “the most valiant nation of the Attacotti,” but who, if we may believe the extraordinary statement of St. Jerome, were actually addicted to the practice of cannibalism. In the three years of Theodosius’ command, the northern invaders were driven back to their mountains, the inhabitants of “that ancient town which was formerly called Londinium but which (in the fourth century) “more often bore the name Augusta” were relieved from their terrors: a new province, the geographical position of which is not made known to us, was staked out and received the name Valentia, in compliment to the emperor. For the time, but probably not for a long time, the blessings of “the Roman peace” were restored to Britain. The general who had achieved this result was shortly after executed at Carthage, a victim to the cowardly suspicion and jealousy of the Emperor Valens, brother of Valentinian. Soon, however, the whirligig of Time brought about a strange revenge. Valens himself perished in the awful catastrophe of Hadrianople, the battle in which the Visigoths utterly routed a great Roman army, the battle which first brought home to the minds of men the possibility of the collapse of the Roman empire. The nephew of Valens, the young and generous Gratian, looking round for some man who as partner of his throne might avert the menaced ruin, found none more suitable than the son and namesake of the murdered pacifier of Britain, and accordingly, in the year 379, Theodosius (whom historians have surnamed the Great) was hailed as Augustus at Constantinople.

But now did Britain begin to rear that crop of rival emperors who were the curse of Europe during some of the dying days of the western empire. In 383 a general named Maximus, of whom an unfavourable witness, the ecclesiastic Orosius, testifies that he was “vigorous and honest and would have been worthy of the diadem if he had not, to obtain it, broken his oath of loyalty” was almost against his will declared emperor by the army. He crossed over into Gaul, carrying with him no doubt the bulk of his army. He skilfully played on the disaffection of Gratian’s legions, offended at the partiality which he had showed for his barbarian auxiliaries; a general mutiny was organised; Gratian fled for his life, was pursued and murdered near the city of Vienne. For five years Theodosius had to endure the enforced partnership in the empire of his benefactor’s murderer: then in 388 the smouldering hatred broke out into a flame, and after a hard struggle Maximus was defeated and slain at Aquileia, on the northern shore of the Adriatic (388). According to traditions current two centuries later, this usurpation of Maximus and his consequent withdrawal of the British legions in order to vindicate his claims to the empire, were most important factors in the overthrow of Roman power in Britain.

A large army, on paper, still existed in the island. It was probably about the year 402 that the last edition of the Notitia Imperii, that edition which has been handed down to posterity, was issued from the imperial chancery. In this most valuable document—an army list and official directory of both the eastern and western portions of the empire—we still find cohorts of infantry and wings of cavalry stationed per lineam valli (along the line of the Wall) as they had been for three centuries. We may, however, doubt whether any Roman soldiers were actually keeping the line of the Wall so late as 402. It is remarkable that very few coins have been found in the ruins of the camps of a later date than the reign of Gratian (375–83). If there were any such military units still there, they were probably but the ghosts of their former selves.

To understand the political condition of our island at this time we must have recourse to the pages of the Notitia, which elaborately sets forth the various degrees of the civil and military hierarchy of the empire. On one page we find:—

The Illustrious Prætorian Prefect of the Gauls.

“Under his disposition are the Vicarii of Spain, of the Seven Provinces of Gaul and of Britain.”

On a later page:—

“The Spectabilis Vicarius Britanniarum.”

Under his disposition were five (civil) governors:—

The Consularis of	Maxima Cæsariensis.
„	Valentia.
The Præses of	Britannia Prima.
„	Britannia Secunda.
„	Flavia Cæsariensis.

The limits and geographical position of these five districts (we are not entitled to call them provinces) have not yet been ascertained, though they have been often conjectured. It may be hoped that the discovery of further inscriptions may enable us to fix them decisively.[19]

Besides these civil officers there were, according to the rearrangement of offices made by Diocletian, certain military commandants, called comites and duces, of whom the count was, contrary to medieval usage, generally of higher rank than the duke.

The Notitia introduces us to three of these officers:—

1. The Comes Britanniæ.

2. The Comes Litoris Saxonici per Britanniam.

3. The Dux Britanniarum.

As to the first it gives us no information beyond the simple fact that the Provincia Britannia was “under his disposition”. The obvious conjecture is that numbers 2 and 3 were subject to him, but this is not asserted, and it perhaps militates against this theory that they, like him, belonged to the second grade in the official hierarchy, the spectabiles. It is possible that his special duty was the defence of Mid-Britain against the imperfectly subdued tribes of the Welsh mountains, and that the Second legion at Caerleon and the Twentieth at Chester were for a time under his orders for this purpose. The more interesting title for us is that of “The Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain”. He had under his command the garrisons of seven fortified places dotted around the eastern and south-eastern coast of England, from the Wash to Beachy Head.[20] He had also at his bidding the prefect of the Second “Augustan” legion, which had been moved from the quarters it had so long occupied at Caerleon-upon-Usk to Rutupiæ, or Richborough, close to the Isle of Thanet. The meaning of this arrangement is obvious. Like the Martello towers, which were reared along the same coasts last century, these fortresses were raised and garrisoned in order to defend that part of the projecting coast of Britain which was most exposed to the attacks of the Saxon pirates, already no doubt swarming in these seas in the fourth century, and to become far more formidable in the fifth century. The words, “per Britanniam,” added to the title of the spectabilis comes, are used because, as the Notitia informs us, there was another Saxon shore which needed to be guarded on the other side of the channel; and, taken in this connexion, there is a special interest for us in the words of Apollinaris Sidonius, bishop of Clermont,[21] which show that in the succeeding century the coasts of Gaul, as well as of Britain, were kept in constant alarm by the Saxon sea-rovers.

3. Of the Duke of the Britains we have only here to remark that he appears to have had under his disposition the Sixth legion, stationed at York, and numerous detachments of auxiliary troops in Yorkshire, Westmorland and Lancashire, and item per lineam valli (also along the line of the wall) the various auxiliary cohorts raised in Spain, Gaul and Germany, to whom reference has already been made, and who are to all students of the literature of the Roman wall among the most interesting elements of the army of the empire.

Meanwhile events were rapidly ripening towards the catastrophe which was to make the solemn Notitia Imperii a mere hunting-ground for the archæologist. In 395 died the great Emperor Theodosius, who had for a generation staved off the ruin which seemed inevitable at the death of Valens. He was succeeded by his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, who, with about equal incapacity, presided over the collapse of the eastern and the western half of the empire. For the first thirteen years, however, of the reign of Honorius his incapacity was somewhat veiled by the courage and ability of the Vandal soldier Stilicho, whom Theodosius had left as the guardian of his son. When in the year 400 Alaric, the far-famed King of the Goths, entered Italy, Stilicho undertook the long and wearisome campaigns, partly, as it would seem, north of the Alps, but chiefly in what we now call Piedmont and Lombardy, by which Alaric’s designs on Rome were foiled, and at last in the year 403 the Goths were driven forth from Italy. But in order to avert the danger which thus threatened the heart of the empire, it was necessary seriously to weaken the defence of its extremities. One of the three Roman legions quartered in Britain (probably the Twentieth) was recalled to Italy and apparently never returned. Three years after the repulse of Alaric came in 406 the great cataclysm of the irruption of barbarian hordes, Vandals, Sueves, Burgundians and Alans into Gaul, which led, though not immediately, to the severance of Gaul and Spain from the empire. The inrush of the barbarians spread terror even into Britain, and caused the soldiers, weary of the inept government which was manifestly ruining the empire, to elect an emperor on their own account, and set up, as it were, a “government of national defence”. But revolutionary rulers of this kind are more easily proclaimed than established. First a certain Marcus was proclaimed: then as they found that “he did not suit their tempers” he was slain, and a British citizen named Gratian was invested with the purple, crowned with the diadem and surrounded with a bodyguard. After four months Gratian also was deposed and murdered, and thereupon a private soldier of the meanest rank, named Constantine, who had nothing but that great historic name to recommend him, was robed in the imperial purple. He at once crossed over into Gaul, where he maintained himself with varying fortune for three or four years, being even once, in 409, for a short time recognised as a legitimate partner in the empire by Honorius. With his later fortunes, however, and with the whole story of the fall of the Roman empire in the west we have no further concern. We have heard of the exit of the legions, but we never hear of their return, and we are probably justified in fixing on the date 407, the period of the usurper Constantine’s departure from our island, as the end of the Roman occupation of Britain.

Writers and readers must alike lament the extremely jejune character of the history of that occupation. Since we lost the guidance of Tacitus, we have had scarcely anything that could be called a continuous and intelligible narrative of events; nor, unless some happy fortune could restore to us the lost books of Ammianus, is such literary assistance now to be expected. We are thus thrown back on such information as inscriptions, buried ruins, finds of coins may afford to the patient archæologist. And these have done something for us, though we may reasonably hope that the judicious use of the spade and pickaxe, guided by science and not by mere capricious quest for curiosities, may do much more.

We may here notice very briefly some of the chief contributions which archæological research has thus made to history.

1. Of all the marks made by our imperial conquerors in this island, the most distinct and ineffaceable was that made by them as road-makers. Often indeed their works survive only as boundaries between parishes or counties, but sometimes we can see the track still going straight to its mark over hill and dale, and we say instinctively, “That must be a Roman road”. It was certainly not mere unskilfulness or ignorance of the science of road-making which led the stratores viarum to draw their lines across the country with this uncompromising directness. The prime object of the officer charged with the work was essentially military, and for watching the movements of barbarian insurgents or preventing the ravages of marauders, the crests of the hills successively surmounted by the marching legions were invaluable posts of observation.

The chief highways of the Romans, known to us for the most part by the names given to them by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, converging, as most of them do, towards “the town anciently named Londinium,” coincide in a remarkable manner with the main lines of our modern railroad communication. The Watling Street, running from the neighbourhood of London to Etocetum (a little north of Birmingham) and thence to Deva (Chester) and so on into Lancashire, corresponds with the London and North-Western Railway; while another road which generally bears the same name and which traverses Yorkshire and Northumberland is less accurately represented by the North-Eastern. Erming Street, from London to Doncaster, is often not far from the line of the Great Northern; and Abona (on the Avon near Bristol) and Isca Damnoniorum (Exeter) were reached by roads bearing now no special names, but imitating in their general course the Great Western and South-Western Railways. One great artery, the Fosse Way, may be clearly traced between Axminster (in Devonshire) and the great colony which now bears the name of Lincoln; but this road has no representative in our railway system. The imperfect character of the Roman conquest of the district which we now call Wales is evidenced by the feeble and fragmentary traces of Roman roads now to be found in the principality. There was, however, a road traversing the country from north to south, from Carnarvon to Carmarthen, and thence by a somewhat circuitous course to Caerleon-upon-Usk, and part of this road is still known by the name of Sarn Helen. Is it possible that there is in this name some vague and inaccurate remembrance of the mother of Constantine?

2. The sepulchral inscriptions which have been discovered in large numbers in various parts of the island give us a little insight into the domestic relations of the Roman garrison, as the votive altars do into their sentiments concerning religion. The former class of inscriptions always begin in the usual Roman style with a dedication to the Dii Manes, the shade-gods, or, as we should say, the spirit of the departed one, and often add some endearing epithet to the name, such as “a well-deserving husband,” “a most religious wife who lived for thirty-three years an unspotted life”. Where the age is mentioned it is most frequently that either of a child or a person in middle life, the numbers between thirty and forty being of frequent occurrence. This is probably accounted for by the fact that veterans, whether officers or privates, would generally return to their native land to spend the last years of their lives. The religious inscriptions bring before us some interesting phenomena, but are so far characterised by one memorable omission, that of the new religion which was destined to supplant the old. The ordinary Olympian deities, Jupiter, Mars, Bellona, Neptune, are of course commemorated, though in a somewhat perfunctory fashion; and the official divinity of the emperors, living and dead, is duly recognised. But we have also a number of altars to gods bearing uncouth Celtic names: Belatucader, Anociticus, Cocidius and the like, plainly showing that the Roman soldiers, like the Assyrian settlers in Palestine,[22] wished to keep on good terms with the gods of the land. Even more conspicuous is the devotion of the Roman soldiers to “the unconquered Mithras”. The strange Oriental cult called Mithraism, probably a form of sun-worship, spread rapidly through the Roman empire in the second and third centuries, and seemed likely at one time to be a successful rival to Christianity. It is marvellous to see in the palace of the Roman emperors at Ostia a chapel with all the emblems of Mithraic worship, and then to find the remains of a similar chapel with precisely similar emblems, though broken and mutilated, on the bare hillside of Housesteads in Northumberland. The favourite symbol of this strange dead religion is a young man, crowned with a tiara, bestriding a bull, into whose side he is driving deep a short sword or dagger. Whatever this curious bas-relief may represent—and some have seen in it a symbol of the sun, the unconquered hero entering the constellation Taurus—it was no doubt faithfully reproduced in that little chapel on our northern moorlands, and it is perfectly figured on a small marble tablet lately discovered under the pavement of a London street while the workmen were repairing a sewer.

Thus, of so many strange pagan superstitions we have abundant vestiges, but of Christianity in Roman Britain we have singularly few traces. It is true that here and there among undoubtedly Roman remains the Christian monogram (X P) or Christian formulæ such as Vivas in Deo or Spes in Deo have been met with.[23] In the recent excavations at Silchester a small building which is almost certainly a Christian basilica has also been discovered, but these are slight evidences for the existence of a faith which was certainly professed by multitudes ere the legions quitted Britain. As to the actual date of the introduction of Christianity into our island we must be contented to confess our ignorance. The story contained in the book of Papal Lives, which was reproduced by Bede, that a certain King Lucius of Britain, about the year 180, sent over to Pope Eleutherus, asking for missionaries to instruct his people in the Christian faith, must be dismissed as the fable of a later age; nor can we speak with much certainty concerning the so-called proto-martyr, St. Alban, who is said to have suffered for the faith in the persecution of Diocletian. There can be no doubt, however, that there were some converts to Christianity in Britain during the second century, and in the third century it must have become the dominant religion here as in the rest of the empire. Towards the end of that century our island, which produced so many rival Cæsars, produced also one of the most famous of heretics, Pelagius, and, of course, the existence of his heterodoxy implies also the existence of the orthodoxy out of which it sprang. Thus, though we cannot help sometimes relying on the “argument from silence,” the present condition of our archæological information concerning the existence of Christianity in Roman Britain shows us how untrustworthy may sometimes be that very argument.

3. It is, however, partly in reliance on such negative evidence that we venture to assert that the Roman occupation of Britain was before all things a military occupation, and that they either did not attempt, or did not succeed in the attempt, largely to win over the inhabitants to their own ways and to accustom them to that civic life which had been the cradle of their own civilisation. In Italy itself, in Gaul and in most of the provinces of western Europe we find abundant evidence of the municipalisation of the conquered tribes. “Decurio” and “Duumvir,” which we may represent by town councillor and mayor, are indications of rank which we meet with continually on provincial tombstones in those countries; but in Britain amid the crowd of inscriptions to centurions, tribunes and other military officers who served here we meet with only one here and there to civic dignitaries. “The highest form of town life known to the Romans was naturally rare in Britain. The coloniæ and municipia, the privileged municipalities, with institutions on the Italian model, which mark the supreme development of Roman political civilisation in the provinces, were not common in Britain. We know only of five: Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester, and York were coloniæ, Verulam probably a municipium, and despite their legal rank none of these could count among the greater cities of the empire. Four of them, indeed, probably owed their existence not to any development of Britain but to the need of providing for time-expired soldiers discharged from the army.”[24] There was, of course, a certain number of towns such as Londinium which had sprung out of pre-Roman settlements, some of which no doubt grew and prospered exceedingly with the growth of commerce due to the prevalence of “the Roman peace,” but these towns were apparently not modelled on the Roman pattern, and what may have been the nature of their institutions can only be a matter of conjecture.

It seems probable that the prevailing type of social organisation during the Roman period was the villa or great estate owned by a Roman proprietor and dotted over with the cottages of British serfs or slaves, whose labour was directed for his lord’s benefit by a villicus or farm bailiff, sometimes himself a slave. Whether or no this system lasted on to any great extent after the Saxon invasion (the barbarian invader seating himself in the place of power and claiming all his ousted predecessor’s rights), and whether it thus passed in the course of centuries into the feudal manor, is one of the most interesting questions now debated by our archæologists. Mr. Seebohm is the most conspicuous advocate of this Roman-villa theory, which cuts right across the theories of Kemble and Freeman, who held that the Teutonic invaders brought with them to our island and everywhere established a system of free but co-operative land-ownership, resembling that described in the Germania of Tacitus. The discussion, as has been said, is one of great interest to all who desire to get below the surface in the history of the past ages of Britain, but many positions will probably be won and lost before the battle is finally decided.

The same may be said of the larger question, how far the influence exerted by our Roman conquerors during the four centuries of their stay lasted on after the departure of the legions. That Britain was not assimilated as Gaul was, is admitted by all, the mere fact that Welsh is not, like French, an offshoot from Latin, being in itself a sufficient proof of the difference between the two conquests; but why the Romanisation of Britain was so much less thorough; how far it did after all extend; and what influences modified or destroyed it; these are all questions still unsolved, to which, however, we may, perhaps, some day get an answer from a more thorough and scientific study of Celtic literature, and of Romano-British antiquities.

CHAPTER VI.
THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST.

With the departure of the Roman legions from Britain we enter upon a period of even denser darkness than those which we have been lately traversing, nor is the veil lifted till by the mission of St. Augustine (596) our island is again brought into the family of the Christian nations of Europe. The two centuries during which the voice of authentic history is thus silent, from 407 to 596, were the period of the fall of the Roman empire in the west and the establishment in its stead of the great Teutonic kingdoms, Frankish, Burgundian, Visigothic, from which the states of modern Europe are descended.

Owing to the extremely imperfect character of our information concerning the Anglo-Saxon conquest, which was for us the chief event of these two centuries, and the fact that scarcely any of it is contemporary, some of it obviously legendary and fabulous, it is impossible to speak with any confidence as to its details. Almost every date may be challenged: “probably” or “to the best of our knowledge” are qualifying clauses which should be prefixed to almost every statement. It may be well, however, first to set forth in broad outlines the main facts which are beyond the reach of controversy. No one doubts that about the middle of the fifth century, if not before, the Romano-Celtic inhabitants of Britain were invaded by Teutonic tribes from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic. The tribes chiefly concerned in the invasion were the Saxons and the Angles, but the smaller nation of the Jutes are said to have been the first to undertake a definite scheme of conquest, and it is asserted with much positiveness that they came at first as auxiliaries to help the Britons against the Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland, who were ravaging the undefended land. To the Jutes is attributed the foundation of the kingdom of Kent and a settlement in the Isle of Wight. The far more numerous Saxons who followed them established the two kingdoms of the South Saxons and East Saxons, which are represented by the modern counties of Sussex and Essex; and after the lapse of two generations the West Saxons, invading Hampshire, laid there the foundation of the great kingdom of Wessex, which gradually included almost all the country south of the Thames. Their kings eventually became lords of the whole of Britain, and were ancestors through females of the sovereign who now sits upon the throne. The Angles, who were apparently the latest comers of all, founded the kingdoms of East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk), Mercia (the midland counties), Deira (Yorkshire), and Bernicia (Durham, Northumberland, and East Scotland as far as the Firth of Forth).

A few words must be said as to the ethnological relations of these three tribes. It is not disputed that they all belonged to the great Low German family of nations, to which the Goths probably belonged and from which the Dutch and most of the inhabitants of northern Germany are descended. As to the little nation of the Jutes we require further information. They were once said to be identical with the Goths, and more recently they have been connected with the inhabitants of Jutland. The first identification is certainly wrong, the second, for philological reasons, is doubtful.[25] It seems that at present the question must be left in suspense.[26]

The Saxons were placed by the geographer, Ptolemy (who wrote early in the second century), in the country now known as Holstein, but in the fourth century the name seems to have been applied to a much wider range of people. The Saxons with whom Charlemagne waged his stubborn wars at the close of the eighth century, inhabited the whole of Westphalia, Hanover and Brunswick and other lands beside. From any part of that country our Saxon ancestors may have come.

Of the Angles, who in the first century after Christ were living on the right bank of the Elbe, near its mouth, Tacitus gives us an interesting account. He tells us that they, together with the kindred tribes between Elbe and Oder, worshipped the great goddess Nerthus, whose image, ordinarily kept in the dark recesses of a sacred island, at certain seasons paraded the lands of her votaries in a chariot drawn by kine. Wherever the image of the goddess came, mirth reigned and war ceased; but when her pilgrimage was ended, the image and the chariot, returning to the dark island, were washed in a sacred lake, beneath whose waters all the slaves who had taken part in the ceremony were at once engulfed, in order to ensure their silence as to the mysteries which they had beheld. A more interesting fact for us is the close relation which, according to Tacitus, existed between the Angli and the Longobardi, the tribe by whom, after long wanderings through central Europe, the conquest of Italy was at last achieved in 568, possibly at the very time when some of their old Anglian neighbours were beginning to fit out their barks for the invasion of England. This ethnological connexion is confirmed by the similarity of names to be found among the two nations, a similarity which is but slightly veiled by the changes which in the course of five centuries turned the Lombards from a people speaking Low German to one with a High German language. Thus the Adelperga of the Lombards corresponds to the Ethelberga of the Anglo-Saxons; Sisibert to Sigeberht, Alipert to Alberht, Rotopert to Rodberht, Adelbert to Ethelberht, and Audoin to Edwin. Moreover, the great historian of the Lombards, Paulus Diaconus, who wrote towards the end of the eighth century, tells us that their queen, Theodelinda, adorned her palace at Pavia with pictures representing the Lombard invaders of Italy in the very garb which they then wore, and which had become antiquated in the two centuries that had elapsed before his own time. “Their garments,” he says, “were loose and for the most part made of linen, such as the Anglo-Saxons are wont to wear, adorned with wide borders woven in various colours.” This is a valuable note of costume, for its own sake, and a striking confirmation of the close relationship once existing between the ancestors of two great nations now joined in friendly alliance.

* * * * *

After this sketch of the antecedents of the three new actors on the stage of British history, it remains for us to examine the evidence—the slender evidence, as has been already said—as to their proceedings during the conquest. It will be well to consider this evidence under three heads:—

(1) The slight notices contained in the works of contemporary or nearly contemporary Latin authors.

(2) The story of the conquest as given to us by the descendants of the invaders, that is, especially by Bede and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

(3) The same story as told by the descendants of the conquered, that is, especially by Gildas and Nennius.

1. In the fifth century the writing of history in the Roman empire had practically dwindled down to the composition of short books of chronicles, generally by ecclesiastics. As literary compositions they have no merit: they are generally very short, giving only three or four lines to each year, and they have no sense of the proportionate importance of the events which they record. But they give us for the most part absolutely contemporary evidence, and the historian, therefore, accepts them gratefully, with all their defects. One such chronicle, by no means the best of its kind, is generally known by the name of Prosper Tiro (a friend and correspondent of St. Augustine), though it is certain that it was not written by him but by some ecclesiastic of the period, with semi-Pelagian views. This dull and second-rate writer gives us the two following precious entries, the only contemporary evidence that we possess as to the Saxon invasions: “The fifteenth year of Arcadius and Honorius [A.D. 409]: at this time the strength of the Romans was utterly wasted by sickness; and the provinces of Britain were laid waste by the incursion of the Saxons”. “The eighteenth year of Theodosius II. [A.D. 441]: the provinces of Britain which up to this time had been torn by various slaughters and disasters, are brought under the dominion of the Saxons.”

There are two points in these entries to which the reader’s attention should be particularly directed: the first, that the Saxon invasions are represented as beginning in 409, almost immediately after the departure of the usurper Constantine with the legions; the second, that the subjugation of Britain by the Saxons is assigned by the chronicler to 441, not 449, the date usually current on the authority of Bede. It should be remarked, in passing, that if the chronicler supposed that the whole of Roman Britain (which he calls Britanniæ, in the plural) came under the dominion of the Saxons (or Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) in that year, he was certainly mistaken. But some important stage in the conquest, if we may trust this, our only contemporary authority, was evidently reached in the year 441, and it was the climax of a series of aggressions which had apparently been going on for thirty-two years.

It should be mentioned that one other nearly contemporary authority, the Greek historian Zosimus, alludes to the collapse of Roman rule in Britain, which he attributes to a revolt of the natives, following on the departure of the usurper Constantine with the legions. His language, however, is obscure and even self-contradictory, and he throws little light on the situation.

The authority which we have next to consider is the Life of St. Germanus, written by the presbyter Constantius about the year 480. It will be seen that this document is not strictly contemporary, the writer being separated by an interval of about half a century from the chief events recorded by him: and, moreover, there is throughout the Life a tendency to glorify the saint by attributing to him various manifestations of a miraculous or semi-miraculous kind, which does not increase our confidence in his trustworthiness as a historian. But all students of early medieval history are accustomed to this kind of document, in which every remarkable event in the life of the subject of the biography is invested with a halo of thaumaturgic sanctity, and though they are not the sort of historic materials which we prefer, we must accept them (while making our own private reservations as to the amount of faith which we repose in all their details) or give up writing the story of the Middle Ages altogether.

In the case before us, the missionary Germanus, whose adventures in Britain are related by the biographer, was a great and well-known historical personage. He had held, under the empire, the high military dignity of duke of the Armorican shore (Normandy and Brittany), had been consecrated Bishop of Auxerre against his will, had thereupon said farewell to the delights of sportsmanship, and entered earnestly on the duties of his new calling. He had as a fellow-missionary, Lupus, who many years after, as Bishop of Troyes, earned great renown by dissuading the savage warrior, Attila, from an attack on his cathedral city. It is a striking testimony to the character of both men that their contemporary, Apollinaris Sidonius, when he wishes to celebrate the virtues of another eminent prelate, Anianus, Bishop of Orleans, can find no higher term of praise than this: “He was equal to Lupus and not unequal to Germanus”. Such were the two men who in the year 429 were sent at the bidding of Pope Celestine, and in conformity with the resolutions of a synod of Gaulish bishops, “to purge the minds of the people of Britain from the Pelagian heresy and bring them back to the Catholic faith,” that is, to the Augustinian teaching on free-will and the Divine grace. Their zealous preaching won over the multitude to their side, but the Pelagians, who seem to have been found chiefly among the wealthier Britons, challenged them to a public discussion, in which their simple earnestness prevailed over the elaborate rhetoric of the gaily clothed orators on the other side. A miracle followed: the restoration of sight to a little girl of ten years old, the daughter of “a certain man of tribunician rank”. After visiting the tomb of the martyred Saint Alban and exchanging relics with the keepers of the shrine, they resumed their journey, but, unfortunately, Germanus was for several days confined by a sprained ankle to a humble cottage in the country. The cottage itself and all the little hovels round it were thatched with reeds from the marsh, and fire having broken out in the little settlement, the saint’s life seemed to be in jeopardy, but he refused to stir, and his cottage alone remained unconsumed.

Then followed the celebrated incident of the Hallelujah battle which is the chief reason for referring to the mission. The scene of the encounter is not made known to us, but it evidently took place in a mountainous country, possibly in Wales.[27] The first sentence of the biographer, describing the campaign, is so important that it must be translated literally: “In the meanwhile the Saxons and the Picts, driven into one camp by the same necessity, with conjoined force undertook war against the Britons, and, when the latter deemed their strength unequal to the contest, they sought the aid of the holy bishops, who, hastening their arrival, brought with them such an accession of confidence as was equivalent to a mighty host”. The biographer then describes the baptism of the larger part of the army on Easter day; their eagerness for battle while they were still moist with the baptismal water; the choice of the battle-field by the veteran officer Germanus; that battle-field a valley surrounded by mountains; the placing of an ambuscade whose duty it was to signal to him the approach of the foe. At the signal given the bishops gave the word “Hallelujah,” which was repeated in a tremendous shout by the multitudes carefully posted out of sight, and was repeated from peak to peak of the surrounding mountains. Hereat the terror-stricken foes imagined not only rocks hurled down upon them, but the very artillery of heaven let loose for their destruction. Casting away their arms they fled in all directions, and the larger number of them were swallowed up in the river which they had just crossed; the Hallelujah victory was complete, a victory like that of Gideon over the Midianites, won by moral means alone.

This narrative when we remember its nearly contemporary character has an important bearing on the history of Britain in the fifth century. It seems to show that, twenty years after the withdrawal of the legions, the condition of the Britons was not absolutely desperate. There were still among them wealthy men and eloquent ecclesiastics dressed in costly garments, and the people were not too much engrossed by the mere struggle for existence to have leisure to listen to the elaborate arguments about original sin, free will and assisting grace which formed the staple of the Pelagian controversy. Moreover the union of the Saxons with the Picts in the hostile army is surely a point of no small importance. If we connect it with the previously quoted entry of Tiro, assigning to the year 409 the beginning of a series of Saxon devastations, we may suspect that the commonly received story which attributes the Teutonic invasions entirely to the folly of the Britons who called in the Saxons to help them against the Picts, is, if not altogether false, at any rate an exaggeration of one not very important incident in the contest.

* * * * *

2. For the story told by the invaders, our chief authorities are Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. (a) It must be confessed that for this part of the history we do not get much assistance from the monk of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede. He was probably the most learned man of his time in Europe; his conception of the duty of a historian is a high and noble one, and when we reach the seventh century, the golden age of Northumbrian Christianity, we shall find his assistance invaluable; but, writing as he did in 731, he was separated by nearly three centuries from the great Saxon invasions, and it seems clear that he had little or nothing derived from the genuine traditions of his race to say concerning them. The first book of his Ecclesiastical History is therefore little more than a mosaic of passages from Orosius, Eutropius, and, pre-eminently, the Briton Gildas (hereafter to be described), from whom he derives almost the whole history of the Caledonian invasion, and of the calling in of the Saxons as defenders against the attacks of the Picts. It is, however, to Bede that we owe the first mention of the British king Vortigern as well as of the names of Hengest and Horsa. It must remain an unsolved question from what source Bede derived the name of Vortigern, the inviter of the Saxons into Britain. Gildas, who is his main authority for this part of the story, while hinting at the personality of Vortigern, hides his name. After describing the three invading nations, the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles, Bede continues: “Their generals” (according to strict grammatical construction this should refer not to the Jutes but to the Angles) “are said to have been two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, of whom Horsa was afterwards slain in war by the Britons. To this day a monument inscribed by his name exists in the eastern parts of Kent. These two were sons of Wictgils, the son of Witta, the son of Wecta, the son of Woden, from whose stock the royal families of many provinces derived their origin.” Bede then goes on to describe how the bands of the three nations already named began to pour into the island, how they made a treaty with the Picts whom they had previously conquered and driven far away, and how they then turned their arms against their British allies. From this point he merely copies Gildas, describing in lamentable tones the ravage wrought by his countrymen. It is pointed out by Bede’s latest editor, Plummer, that such information as the Northumbrian monk possessed concerning Kent would be naturally derived by him from his Kentish friends, Albinus, abbot of Canterbury, and Nothelm, priest of the church of London, to both of whom he expressly refers in his preface. But apparently even their traditions could not carry him very far. Save for such information as the conquered race could supply, Bede’s mind was little more than a blank as to events in England between the ages of Honorius and Gregory the Great.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the great historical monument of our race in its youthful days, and probably owes its original inception to the wise encouragement of Alfred. As that great prince ruled in the later years of the ninth century it is plain that the interval between the historian and the events recorded is even greater in the case of the Chronicle than in that of Bede. To a considerable extent the early annals in the Chronicle are founded upon Bede’s history, and so far we may safely neglect them since they add nothing to the evidence already before the court; but there is also a certain amount of information, especially relating to the kingdom of Wessex, to which we find nothing that corresponds in Bede; and this part of the Chronicle—whatever it may be worth—must of course be treated as a primary authority. What is the real historical value of the statements which we find in it concerning yet heathen England? There is evidently in them some admixture of the fabulous. When we find, as we shall do, a Saxon chieftain, Port, described as the founder of Portsmouth, the Portus Magnus of the Romans, and Wihtgar made the name-giver to the Isle of Wight, which had been known as Vectis for centuries before he was born, we feel that we are in the presence of traditions, not genuine but manufactured out of etymology. Moreover the dates so elaborately given by the Chronicle seem to have been arranged (as was pointed out by Lappenberg) on an artificial system with recurring periods of eight and four years; which looks like the work of men with slender materials trying to make the bricks of history without the straw of genuine chronology. There is a good deal of distrust of the earlier portions of the Chronicle in the minds of historical students, side by side with a high appreciation of its general fairness, and gratitude to the scribes who have preserved for us so much of the records of the past, even though their narrative is often somewhat arid. On the whole it seems the wisest, in fact the only possible course, to take thankfully the information which the Chronicle gives us as to these two mist-enshrouded centuries, not absolutely maintaining its accuracy in every particular, but yielding to it a provisional assent, until either by internal or external evidence it shall be proved to be legendary or impossible.

It may be as well to state here that there are various manuscripts of the Chronicle hailing from different ecclesiastical centres, the divergences of which in the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon history are sometimes of great importance. For the present, however, this question does not arise. Save for a few not very important Northumbrian interpolations, the manuscripts of the Chronicle may be considered as one, and their source of origin may be considered to have been Winchester, the focus of all West Saxon government and culture.

The allusions made in the Chronicle to the departure of the Romans from Britain are naturally very scanty: “In 409 the Goths broke up the city of Rome, and never after that did the Romans rule in Britain”. “In 418 the Romans gathered together all the gold-hoards that were in Britain and hid some in the earth, so that no man thenceforth should ever find them, and some they took with them into Gaul.” Let us proceed therefore to examine the evidence furnished from this source as to the foundation of the kingdoms of Kent, Sussex, Wessex, and Northumbria. As to the early history of East Anglia, Essex and Mercia the Chronicle is altogether silent.

Kent.—A.D. 449.[28] Wyrtgeorn [Vortigern] invites the Angles to Britain. They come over in three “keels” and land at Heopwines-fleet [Ebbs-fleet in the Isle of Thanet], and he gives them lands in the south-east of the country on condition of their fighting the Picts. This they do successfully, but they send home for more of their countrymen, telling them of the worthlessness of the Britons and the goodness of the land. Their generals were two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, sons of Wictgils with the pedigree as given by Bede.

A.D. 455. Hengest and Horsa fight with Vortigern at Aegeles-threp [Aylesford on the Medway]. Horsa is slain. Hengest assumes the title of king, and associates with himself his son Aesc.

A.D. 456. Hengest and Aesc fight with the Britons at Crecgan-ford [Crayford, about six miles south-east of Woolwich], and slay 4,000 of them. The Britons evacuate Kent and with much fear flee to London-borough.

A.D. 465. Hengest and Aesc fight with the “Welshmen” [Britons] near Wippedes-fleote, and there slay twelve Welsh nobles, themselves losing one thane, whose name was Wipped.

A.D. 473. Hengest and Aesc fight with the “Welshmen,” and take booty past counting. The Welsh flee “as a man fleeth fire”.

That is all the information vouchsafed us as to the conquest of Kent, which was evidently not an easy matter, taking as it did nearly thirty years to finish. Possibly ere the strife was ended the invaders somewhat modified their views as to the military worthlessness of the Britons. London, which is transiently mentioned here in the annal for 456 is not mentioned again in the Chronicle till 851. We hear of it, however, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in 604. The history of Kent is a blank from the year 473 till 565 when Ethelbert, who afterwards embraced Christianity, began his long reign of fifty-three years.

Sussex.—We know from other sources that, far on into the Middle Ages, Sussex was divided from Kent by the dense forest of the Andredesweald or Andredesleag, and accordingly the conquest of one country by no means necessitated the conquest of the other, which is assigned to a considerably later date than that given for the landing of Hengest and Horsa.

A.D. 477. Aelle with three sons and three keels come to the place called Cymenes ora. He slays many “Welshmen,” and drives others to take refuge in the wood that is called Andredesleag.

A.D. 485. He fights with “Welshmen” near Mearcredesburn.

A.D. 491. “Aelle and Cissa begirt Andredesceaster and slay all who dwell therein, nor was there for that reason one Briton left alive.”

This wholesale butchery of the British defenders of the Roman fortress of Anderida, overlooking Pevensey Bay, has naturally attracted much attention, and is constantly appealed to by those who maintain that the earlier stages of the Saxon conquest were an absolute war of extermination. It is to be observed that Aelle, who founded an exceptionally short-lived dynasty, is not credited with any long line of ancestors reaching back to the mythic Woden. Chichester, capital of the South Saxon kingdom, founded probably on the site of the Roman city of Regnum, is said to have derived its name from Cissa, son of Aelle.

Wessex.—As might naturally be expected in a chronicle having its birth-place in Winchester, the historical details as to Wessex are much fuller than for the other kingdoms; so full that it is possible to relinquish the mere annalistic form and to weave them into a continuous narrative. In 495 (more than half a century after Tiro’s date of the Saxon conquest) two chieftains, Cerdic and Cynric his son, came with five ships to a place called Cerdices ora, and on the very day of their landing fought a battle with the “Welshmen”. The scene of the landing was probably somewhere in the noble harbour of Southampton Water. The two chieftains were not as yet spoken of as kings, but bore the lower title of ealdormen. Of Cerdic, however, the Chronicle recites the usual half-legendary pedigree, reaching back through eight intervening links to Woden, from whom (of course under later Christian influences) the line is traced back to Noah and Adam. These pedigrees, or at least the genuine Teutonic portion of them, may very probably have been preserved in the songs of minstrels, and obviously belong to that element of the Chronicle which is independent of Bede. We may look upon the divine ancestor Woden as marking the limit of the minstrel’s memory or knowledge, and we shall therefore probably be justified in concluding that the West Saxon tribe possessed some sort of continuous historical tradition reaching back for eight generations behind Cerdic (himself a middle-aged man in 495), or about to the beginning of the third century. No wonder that kings whose very flatterers could not trace back their lineage to an earlier date than that of the Emperor Severus, felt their dynasties new and short-lived in presence of the immemorial antiquity of Rome.

In 508, the two chiefs slew a British king named Natanleod and 5,000 men with him. Evidently by this time they must have been at the head of a large number of followers. We are told that “the land”—apparently the scene of the battle—was named after the slain king; and it is generally supposed that this gives us the origin of the name Netley, well known for its ruined abbey and its military hospital. Eleven years later (in 519) they assumed the title of kings, being no longer contented with the humbler designation of ealdormen, and fought the Britons at Cerdicesford, a place identified with Charford on the Avon, about six miles south of Salisbury. Meanwhile, however, there had been other Saxon invasions of the same region. In 501 is placed the visit of the legendary Port with his two sons to Portsmouth, and the death of a young Briton of very high birth who vainly tried to defend his land from their invasion. In 514 certain West Saxon reinforcements are represented as arriving (perhaps in the Isle of Wight) under the leadership of another eponymous hero, Wihtgar, and his brother Stuf, nephews of Cerdic; and, probably with their help, in 530 Cerdic and Cynric took possession of the Isle of Wight, after slaying many Britons at Wihtgaræsbyrg or Carisbrooke. The statements in the Chronicle about the conquest of the Isle of Wight, obscure and confused in themselves, become yet more so when we compare them with an earlier passage interpolated from Bede, in which the Jutes, not the West Saxons, are represented as the conquerors of the Isle of Wight. Of course two tides of Teutonic conquest may have passed over the island, but it is difficult to bring the two lines of tradition into their proper relation to one another.

In 534, Cerdic, who must now have been an old man, ended his life and his near forty years of British warfare, and Cynric his son reigned alone. We may sum up the total of Cerdic’s achievements by saying that he seems to have completed the conquest of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and that he probably fixed his royal residence at the Romano-British city of Venta Belgarum, thereafter to be known as Winchester. The fact that it required the labour of a lifetime to achieve the conquest of a moderate-sized English county, sufficiently shows that the Britons were not the mere Nithings (men of naught) whom Hengest and some of Hengest’s Teutonic countrymen have represented them to have been.

Of the reign of Cynric, which, according to the Chronicle, lasted from 534 to 560, we have but little told us in that work. We hear of a battle at Old Sarum in 552 and of another four years later at Beranbyrig which is identified with Barbury in the north of Wiltshire. Apparently the achievement of his reign was the addition of the greater part of Wiltshire to the West Saxon kingdom. We may so far anticipate the evidence of the British writers as to say that the twenty-six years of Cynric probably coincide with part of the forty-four years of comparative peace which they describe as following the British victory of Mount Badon.

Far fuller of decisive events was the memorable reign of Ceawlin, son of Cynric, which is assigned to the years between 560 and 592. He was the eldest of a gallant band of brothers whose mutually resembling names, Cutha and Cuthwine and Ceol and Ceolric, have given no small trouble to the genealogists. The eighth year of his reign was signalised by an event, unprecedented as far as we know in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, namely, war between the invaders themselves. The object of the West Saxon attack in 568 was Kent, whose young king Ethelbert, after but three years of kingship, saw his land invaded by Ceawlin and his brother Cutha. The battle-place was Wibbandune, possibly Wimbledon in Surrey, and there two of Ethelbert’s ealdormen were slain and himself put to flight. What terms he may have made with the victors we know not, but he was not permanently dethroned, since twenty-eight years afterwards we find him welcoming to his palace in Canterbury the missionaries from Rome.

Three years later (571) a vigorous attack was made by Cutha on the Britons, north of the Thames. A battle was fought at Bedford in which Cutha himself was slain, but victory crowned the Saxon arms in the general campaign, and four towns in Oxfordshire and Bucks (of which Aylesbury alone has retained its importance till the present day) were added to the kingdom of Wessex. The year 577 was of immense importance in the history of the Saxon progress. In that year a great battle was fought at Deorham, in Gloucestershire, about ten miles east of Bristol. There were arrayed on the one side Ceawlin and his brother Cuthwine, on the other three British kings, Coinmail and Condidan and Farinmail, all of whom were slain. Three great cities of Roman foundation (“ceastra” as the Chronicle calls them) were the price of victory: they were Gloucester, Cirencester and Bathanceaster or Bath. All historians are agreed as to the importance of this victory, which not only added Gloucester and (probably) part of Somerset to the West-Saxon kingdom, but by cutting off the Cymry of “West Wales” (Devon and Cornwall) from their brethren north of the Bristol Channel practically ensured their eventual if slow submission.

“In 584 Ceawlin and Cutha fought with the Britons in the place that is called Fethan-lea,[29] and Cutha was slain, and Ceawlin took many ‘towns’ and innumerable quantities of booty and departed in anger to his own land.” The chronicler seems to be here telling us of a Saxon reverse. Though Ceawlin captured many towns and took vast heaps of spoil he lost his son in the great battle and departed in wrath, assuredly in effect defeated, to his own land. After defeat came apparently domestic treason and civil broils. The entries for 591 to 593 show us the proclamation of a certain Ceolric, brother or nephew of Ceawlin, and a battle in 592 evidently not with the Britons, but between Saxon and Saxon, fought at Wodnesbeorge,[30] which resulted in the “driving out” of Ceawlin. Next year (593) Ceawlin with two others, probably princes of his house, named Cuichelm and Crida “perished”.[31] The wording of the annal shows pretty plainly that they all died a violent death, whether on the battlefield or by assassination, whether as friends or foes, it is impossible to say; but there can be no doubt that the sun of Ceawlin’s fortunes, which had at one time shone so splendidly, set in clouds and storms.

In 597 (apparently on the death of Ceolric) Ceolwulf, nephew of Ceawlin, “began to reign over the West Saxons, and he fought continually and successfully either with Englishmen or with Welshmen or with Picts or with Scots”. He was, however, reigning at the time of Augustine’s mission, and with that event the historical interest which has been slightly stirred by the story of the West Saxons’ advance is transferred to another quarter. Throughout the seventh century Kent and Mercia and pre-eminently Northumbria claim our attention so absorbingly that we cannot spare much thought for the obscure annals of Wessex.

Concerning the two Northumbrian kingdoms, Deira and Bernicia, we have no information in the Chronicle for the first hundred years after the landing of Hengest and Horsa. We are then under the year told that Ida (descended in the ninth generation from Woden) was the founder of the royal line of Northumbria; that he built Bebbanburh (Bamburgh) and that this celebrated fortress was in the first instance surrounded with a fence and afterwards with a wall. The chronicler then tells us that in 560, on the death of Ida, Aelle (eleventh in descent from Woden) began to reign over Northumbria and reigned for [nearly] thirty years. The chronicler here either wilfully or inadvertently has suppressed something of the truth. From his language one might have conjectured that Aelle was of the lineage of Ida, and had succeeded peaceably to his ancestor. Instead of this peaceable succession, however, we know from other sources that we have here to deal with two rival kingly lines, whose feuds and reconciliations make an important chapter in Northumbrian history. The true situation was this: essentially the kings of Ida’s line were rulers of Bernicia, while Aelle and his descendants ruled Deira. That is to say: from their steep rock-palace of Bamburgh the sons of Ida reigned by ancestral right over all the eastern portion of the lands between Tyne and Forth, between the wall of Hadrian and the wall of Antoninus. Similarly Aelle and his sons, firmly settled in the great Roman city of Eburacum, governed the country between Tyne and Humber; but each king ever aspired to extend his sway over the other kingdom and often succeeded for a while in doing so. Thus we have constant vicissitudes but a general tendency towards the union of the two kingdoms into one Northumbria, which obeys now an “Iding,” now an “Aelling” ruler. What strifes and commotions may have attended the transition from one line to another we can only in part discern. We are only obscurely told that in 588 Aelle’s line was ousted, and that Ethelric the son, and after him Ethelfrith the grandson of Ida reigned over all Northumbria.

* * * * *

3. We now come to the British version of the conquest. Though a nation is naturally reluctant to tell the story of its own defeat, we might have expected to receive from a comparatively civilised and Christianised people, such as the Romano-Britons of the fifth century, some intelligible literary history of so important an event as the Teutonic conquest of their island. This expectation, however, is dismally disappointed. We have practically nothing from the vanquished people, but the lamentations of the sixth century author Gildas, and the obviously fable-tainted narratives of the puzzle-headed Nennius of the eighth century.

Gildas, who obtained from after ages the surname of “the Wise,” seems to have been a native of Scottish Strathclyde and was born early in the sixth century; he became a monk and at the age of forty-four wrote what Bede truly calls “a tearful discourse concerning the ruin of Britain”. His object in this discourse was to rebuke the ungodliness of his countrymen and to remind them of the tokens of the Divine wrath which they had already received. He is consequently, for our purpose, a most disappointing writer. We go to him for history and we get a sermon, but we ought in fairness to remember that he never proposed to give us anything else. A large part of his treatise consists of reproductions of the denunciatory passages of the old Hebrew prophets: a more interesting section, but one outside our present purpose, consists of fierce invectives against five wicked, or at least unfriendly, kings of Wales. But there are a few chapters, the only ones that now concern us, in which, in pathetic tones, he tells us something as to the circumstances of the invasion of his country. He harks back to the departure from Britain of the usurper Maximus (383), to which, rather than to the later usurpation of Constantine, he traces her defenceless condition. Stripped of the multitude of brave young men who followed the fortunes of Maximus and never returned, and being themselves ignorant of war, the Britons were “trampled under foot by two savage nations from beyond seas, namely the Scots from the north-west and the Picts from the north”. The description of the invaders as coming from beyond the seas is important. The term “Scots” at this time and for four centuries afterwards means primarily the inhabitants of the north of Ireland, and only secondarily the offshoot from that race who settled in Argyll and the Isles. These invaders, of course, were as Gildas calls them “transmarini”: but it is possible that the Picts also, some of whom we know to have been settled in Wigtonshire, came across the shallow land-girdled waters of Solway Firth, instead of attacking the yet undemolished wall, and thus that they too seemed to the dwellers in North-west Britain to be coming from “beyond the seas”.

According to Gildas the Britons sent an embassy to Rome, piteously imploring help against the invaders. The Romans came, drove out the barbarians and exhorted the inhabitants to build a wall between the two seas, which they accordingly did, from Forth to Clyde, building it only of turf. A fresh invasion followed, a second embassy, again utter rout and slaughter of the enemy, but, alas! there came also a solemn warning from the Romans that they could not wear out their strength in these constant expeditions for the deliverance of Britain, and that its inhabitants must henceforth look to their own right arms for safety; but nevertheless before they abandoned them they would help them to build a wall, this time of stone not of turf, on the line between Tyne and Solway. Moreover, they built a line of towers along the coast right down to the southern shore where their ships were wont to be stationed, and then they said farewell to their allies, as men who expected never to see them again.

All this part of Gildas’s story is quite untrustworthy. No one who has carefully studied the architecture of the two walls and the inscriptions along their course will attribute their origin or even any important restorations of them, to those troublous years of dying Rome, the years between 390 and 440. Gildas is here evidently retailing the legend which had sprung up among an ignorant and half-barbarised people as to the great works of the foreigner in their land, and he has not only in this matter “darkened counsel by words without knowledge,” but he has grievously misled his worthy follower Bede, who is brought into hopeless perplexity by his attempt to reconcile his own more correct information about the Roman walls with the unsound Welsh traditions or conjectures which he found in Gildas. The tearful narrative proceeds: There is more misery in Britain: civil war is added to barbarian invasion, and food, save such as can be procured by hunting, vanishes out of the land. In 446 the poor remnants of the Britons send their celebrated letter to that Roman general whose name was at the time most famous among men: the letter which began, “To Aetius,[32] thrice consul, the groans of the Britons,” and went on to say, “The barbarians drive us to the sea: the sea drives us back on the barbarians: we have but a choice between two modes of dying, either to have our throats cut or to be drowned”. But not even this piteous request brought help, for Aetius was too busily occupied with his wars against Attila and the Huns to be able to spare thought or men for the defence of Britain. However, pressed by the pangs of hunger, the Britons grew bolder and even achieved some small measure of success against their enemies. The impudent Hibernian robbers returned to their homes; the Picts at their end of the island remained quiet for a time, though both nations soon began again their plundering forays. But with success came luxury, drunkenness, envy, quarrelsomeness, falsehood, all the signs of a demoralised people. And then for the punishment of the nation came first a pestilence so terrible that the living scarcely sufficed to bury the dead, and then, direst plague of all, the fatal resolution to call in foreign aid.

“A rumour was spread that their inveterate enemies were moving for their utter extermination. A council was called to consider the best means of repelling their fatal and oft-repeated invasions and ravages. Then all the councillors, together with the proud tyrant,[33] with blinded souls, devised this defence (say rather ruin) for their country, that those most ferocious and ill-famed Saxons—a race hateful to God and man—should be invited into the island (as one might ‘invite’ a wolf into the sheepfold) in order to beat back the northern natives. Never was a step taken more ruinous or more bitter than this. Oh, the depth of these men’s blindness! Oh, the desperate and foolish dulness of their minds! ‘Foolish are the princes of Zoan, giving unto Pharaoh senseless counsel.’[34] Then that horde of cubs burst forth from the den of their mother, the lioness, in three cyuls (keels), as their language calls them, or as we should say, ‘long-ships’. They relied on favourable omens and on a certain prophecy which had been made to them, in which it was predicted that for 300 years they should occupy the land towards which their prows were pointed, and for half of that time they should lay it waste by frequent ravages. Thus, at the bidding of that unlucky tyrant did they first fix their terrible claws into the eastern part of the island, pretending that they were going to fight for the deliverance of the country, but in truth intending to capture it for themselves. Then the aforesaid mother-lioness, learning how the first brood had prospered, sent another and more numerous array of her cubs, who, borne hither in barks, joined themselves to these treacherous allies.”

Space fails us to repeat in his own words the whole of the author’s pitiful story. Somewhat condensed it amounts to this: The strangers claimed that liberal rations should be given them in consideration of the great dangers which they ran. The request was granted and “shut the dog’s mouth” for a time. But soon they began to complain of the insufficiency of these rations: they invented all sorts of grievances against their hosts, and used these as a justification for breaking their covenant with the British king, and roaming with ravage all over the island. “The flame kindled by that sacrilegious band spread desolation over nearly all the land till at last its red and savage tongue licked the coasts of the western sea.” The towns [coloniæ] were levelled to the ground with battering rams; the farmers [coloni], with the rulers of the Church, with the priests and people, were laid low by the flashing swords of the barbarians or perished in the devouring flames. Coping-stone and battlement, altars and columns, fragments of corpses covered with clots of gore, were all piled together in the middle of the ruined towns, as in a horrible wine-press. Burial there was none, save under the ruins of the houses or in the maw of some beast of prey or ravenous bird. Some of the miserable remnant who had escaped to the mountains were caught there and slain in heaps. Others, pressed by hunger, submitted and became slaves of the conquerors; others fled beyond the sea. A very few who had fled to the mountains, there on the tops of precipitous cliffs or in the depths of impenetrable forests succeeded in dragging out a life, precarious truly and full of terrors, but still a life in their fatherland.

At last the tide turned. Some of the invaders returned to their own homes, and the unsubdued mountaineers saw the remnant of their countrymen flocking to them from every quarter and beseeching them to save them from extermination. A little band of patriots was thus formed, under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man of modest temper but of high descent, and in fact the only Roman sprung from the wearers of the purple who had survived the storm of the invasion. Under this leader the patriots dared to challenge the invaders to a pitched battle, which, by the favour of the Lord, resulted in their victory. From that time the struggle went on with varying fortune, now the citizens, now the enemy triumphing, till the year of the siege of Mount Badon, which was also the year of the birth of Gildas, and from which forty-four years had elapsed to the time of his present writing. That was the last and greatest slaughter of “the scoundrels”. From that time onwards external war had ceased, and for a space the hearts of all men, delivered from despair and chastened by adversity, turned to the Lord, and all men, whether kings or private persons, whether bishops or simple ecclesiastics, kept their proper ranks and orders in the state. Of late, however, on the decease of the men of that generation, morals had again declined, anarchy had begun to prevail, and owing to the frequent occurrence of civil wars, the cities were no longer inhabited as securely as of old.

Gildas then proceeds to describe further the demoralisation of his countrymen, and especially the outrageous vices of the five contemporary British kings, Constantine, Caninus, Vortipor, Cuneglas, and Maglocunus (or Maelgwn), upon all of whom he pours forth the vials of his righteous indignation; but into this part of his discourse there is no need for us to follow him. However little to our taste may be the somewhat inflated rhetoric of this author, it is important always to remember that he lived about two centuries nearer to the Saxon conquest than our next authority on the subject, Bede, and we must gratefully acknowledge that he does give us a few valuable facts of which we should otherwise be ignorant. His description of the horrors of the invasion, though highly coloured, is sufficiently paralleled by the well-attested events of the later Danish conquest to be not altogether improbable. His mention of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the modest descendant of emperors (perhaps of Maximus or the usurper Constantine), and the brave leader of revolt against the invaders, looks like historical fact, and the story of the British triumph at Mount Badon is not made a whit less probable by the patriotic silence of the Chronicle concerning a Saxon disaster. Both the place and the date of that great battle have been the subjects of long debate. Mons Badonicus used to be thought to represent Bath, and after a good deal of discussion this identification seems again to be coming into favour.

The sentence in which Gildas appears to connect the date of the battle with his own birth is almost hopelessly obscure and the text is probably corrupt; but on the whole it seems most probable that he meant to say, as above suggested: “The battle of Mount Badon was fought forty-four years ago, and in that year I was born”. The Annales Cambriæ (a compilation of the tenth century) give 516 for the year of the battle, a date which would fix the composition of the tearful discourse to 560. Mommsen prefers 500 for the date of the birth of Gildas. In any event there is a strong inducement to connect at least a part of the long period of comparative peace which, according to Gildas, followed the battle of Mount Badon with the confessedly uneventful reign of Cynric, the West Saxon.

* * * * *

We now pass on to the other writer of British origin who dealt with the history of the Anglo-Saxon conquest—namely, Nennius. If one has to speak in rather severe terms of the literary quality of this writer’s work and of the value of his testimony as a historian, it must be remembered in extenuation of his many faults that he lived at a time and in a nation in which literary excellence and the acquisition of accurate knowledge of the past were made well-nigh impossible by the hard pressure of daily life, brutalised and barbarised as it was by perpetual wars both from without and from within. We shall have again to notice the same phenomenon of the utter decay of the historical and literary faculty in a highly cultured people when the Danes ravaged the monasteries of Northumbria, and it is but justice to these poor stammerers of a vanished age to remember how much more easily a nation might then be deprived of its whole literary heritage than can ever now be the case since the invention of printing.

There have been long and sharp discussions as to the age, the country, and even the personality of the author who is generally known as Nennius. The following pages represent the chief conclusions arrived at by a German student of Celtic literature, Professor Zimmer, who in his book, Nennius Vindicatus, has surely vindicated his client’s right to exist, though he admits as fully as any one that client’s terrible deficiencies as a historian. We may now, then, venture to assert that Nennius, the author of the Historia Brittonum, was born about the middle of the eighth century, that he lived in South-East Wales, probably near the borders of Brecon and Radnor, that he wrote his book in or about the year 796, and that it was subjected, about 810, to a very early revision by a scribe who calls himself Samuel, and who lived in North Wales. For some reason or other the book had considerable popularity both in England and on the continent, especially in Brittany, but it suffered much at the hands of ignorant transcribers, and a narrative, not originally very lucid, has in some places been made almost unintelligible, owing to the transposition of some of the leaves of manuscript which have fallen out and been replaced in a wrong order. The restoration of these wrongly sorted chapters to their proper place in the book is one of Professor Zimmer’s greatest achievements. The work of an ill-informed and uncritical scribe such as Nennius evidently was,[35] subject also to all these adversities in the course of its transmission to us, and originally written three centuries and a half after the events recorded, might be considered so poor an authority as to be unworthy of our further notice. But, in the first place, we have practically no other British authority save Gildas for the events which interest us so deeply; and, secondly, the author has at one point incorporated in his work a document much earlier and much more valuable than his own. This is the so-called “Genealogies of the Kings,” which occupy sections 57 to 65 of the Historia Brittonum, and which, though they consist chiefly of strings of names, the ancestors of Anglian kings, are of a comparatively early date, since they bring the history down only to 679 (being thus slightly earlier even than Bede), and have this especial interest for us that we have here, imbedded in a passionately Celtic work, information otherwise lacking as to the rulers of the Anglian kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia in the sixth century.

Probably the most valuable piece of information conveyed to us by Nennius, relating, it is true, rather to the history of Wales than to that of England, is derived from these same Genealogiæ Regum. It is to the effect that Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd (North Wales), was descended in the fifth degree from a certain Cunedag, who with eight sons marched southward from Manau Guotodin (which is identified with the district of Lothian), and drove “the Scots” from the region of Gwynedd, to which they never returned. This southward march took place, he says, 146 years before Maelgwn reigned. Now, Maelgwn, who was one of the five kings so fiercely denounced by Gildas, is a historical personage who certainly reigned in North Wales and whose death is dated in 547. He is also a link in the chain of Welsh kings who continued to reign so long as Wales had any independent rulers. The statement, therefore, amounts to this, that a little before 400, say in 380, or about the date of the usurpation of Maximus, a chieftain named Cunedag with his eight sons, and, doubtless, a large army, marched right across Britain from the Firth of Forth to the Menai Straits, drove out the “Scots,” that is the Irish invaders who were in possession of the country, and established a dynasty which endured for nine centuries (380–1283), till Llewelyn and David, the last royal descendants of Cunedag, were slain by the order of Edward Plantagenet. This is a fact unrelated to any other that has been handed down to us, but which suggests the reflection how many great movements of population, all memory of which has perished, may have been going forward in our island during these mist-covered fifth and sixth centuries of our era. Moreover, the fact that we have here apparently an instance of a Pictish king conducting a campaign of extermination against the “Scots,” though these Scots were in Wales, throws some doubt on the conventional theory that all the calamities of undefended Britain were due to a war in which the Picts and the Scots were acting in concert.

As to the actual events of the Anglo-Saxon conquest Nennius leads us into a perfect jungle-growth of legend and fable, but adds very little to our real information. He repeats the name of the unhappy Vortigern and blackens it with all sorts of foul crimes, such as murder and incest. He blends his narrative with alleged scandals, not only untrue but historically impossible, against the saintly Germanus. He hints that there was rivalry and discord between Vortigern and Ambrosius; and here we can neither confirm nor refute his statement, though certainly the story as told by Gildas does not give us the impression that they were contemporaries. He tells us that when Hengest sent for the second draft of his followers they came over in sixteen keels, and that in one of those keels was “a girl fair of face and very stately in person, the daughter of Hengest” (the name Rowena is not mentioned till a much later age). The damsel serves the king with strong drink. “Satan enters into the heart of Vortigern, and through an interpreter whose name was Ceretic [this little detail looks like genuine tradition] he asks for the maiden in marriage, promising to give half his kingdom in exchange, and he does in fact give her the district of Kent, though a prince named Guoyrancgon was then reigning there and knew not that he was being thus handed over into the power of the pagans.” Hengest then proceeded to give his new son-in-law fatherly advice, which he assured him would effectually secure his kingdom: “I will invite my son and his nephew, for they are warlike men, that they may fight against the Scots, and do thou give unto them those regions which are in the north, next to the wall which is called Guaul”. Obeying this recommendation, Vortigern invited them and they came, “to wit Octha and Ebissa with forty keels; but whilst they were sailing round the Picts they laid waste the Orkney islands, and came and occupied many countries beyond the Frisian Sea [the Firth of Forth?] as far as the boundary of the Picts”. A dark and difficult passage truly; but there is some reason to think that there may be in it a germ of historical truth, and that there was really a Jutish settlement in Scotland.

After this the story relapses into mere romance. We hear of enchanted towers, of a wonder-working child who was afterwards known as the enchanter Merlin, and who apparently calls up the spirit of the dead Ambrosius. Then we are introduced to Vortimer, the brave son of Vortigern, who defeats the barbarians in four great battles; but, dying soon after, he desires to be buried on a hill above the place where they had first landed, since he has a prophetic intimation that they shall not dwell in the land for ever, but shall one day be driven forth; a prophecy the fulfilment of which still lingers. Discouraged by the victories of Vortimer, Hengest now resorts to stratagem, and calls for a conference to which both Britons and Saxons are to come unarmed, and at which they shall establish a league of lasting friendship. Privately, however, he orders his followers to hide each man a small knife under his foot in the middle of his boot, and when he calls out “Eu Saxones nimmath tha saxas” (Ye Saxons grasp the daggers), out flash the deadly weapons; the 300 senators of Vortigern are slain, and he himself is taken prisoner and loaded with chains till he consents to give Hengest Essex and Sussex for his ransom. The story ends with the death of Vortigern. “Some say that he died a broken-hearted wanderer, hated by all his people, and others that the earth opened and swallowed him up on the night on which the enchanted citadel was burned.”

The traitorous conference and Hengest’s cry to his followers seem to have about them a slight savour of probability, but it will probably be the opinion of any one who carefully peruses the chapters of Nennius of which a slight outline has here been traced, that they are for the most part of as much historical value as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. But the elements of which this strange work is composed are of various value. After a sketch of the life of St. Patrick which is taken from a well-known source and which need not here detain us, Nennius gives an important paragraph which seems to be taken from his earlier Northumbrian authority, and, if so, is entitled to more respectful attention: “On the death of Hengest, his son Octha crossed from the northern region of Britain to the kingdom of Kent. From him are descended the present kings of that country. Then did Arthur fight against the Saxons in those days along with the leaders of the Britons, but he himself was leader in the wars.”[36] The author then proceeds to give us the sites of twelve great battles fought by Arthur. Of the eighth, he says it was “in the castle of Guinnion, whereat Arthur carried on his shoulders the image of the holy Mary, ever a Virgin, and the pagans were turned to flight in that day, and a great slaughter was made among them by the power of Christ and his Virgin Mother. The ninth battle was fought in the city of the legion (Castra Legionis).[37]... The twelfth was fought at Mount Badon, at which 960 men fell in one day at one onslaught by Arthur, and no one felled them but he alone, and in all the wars he stood forth as conqueror.”

The scenes of the twelve battles fought by Arthur have been variously identified, some authors placing them in South Wales and some in the Scottish lowlands. Except as regards Castra Legionis and Mons Badonis, there is something to be said for the latter set of identifications, which seem to agree with the Northumbrian origin of the document quoted by Nennius.

Is there any historical truth in the personality of Arthur, or is he a mere creature of romance? The answer to that much-debated question depends on the degree of credit which, upon a review of the whole case, we may consider ourselves at liberty to attach to these few sentences of Nennius. All the rest that has been said concerning him, whether by pseudo-historians, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, by avowed romancers like Sir Thomas Malory, or by poets like Tennyson, is confessedly but the product of imagination, some of it very beautiful, some of it rather foolish; but Nennius, and he alone, can answer for us the question whether Arthur ever really was.

It is believed that the reader has now been introduced to all the authentic information which has been handed down to us concerning the great revolution or rather series of revolutions which changed Britannia into Engla-land. The chroniclers of the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Florence of Worcester, for the most part honourable and truth-seeking men, have dealt with these historical materials, each after his own fashion, seeking to weave them into a connected and harmonious narrative; but it is generally agreed by those who have carefully studied their works that they knew no more than we as to the events of the fifth and sixth centuries, and that historical science can gain little or nothing, for this part of the history of England, from a study of their chronicles. Much less, of course, does it behove us to give any attention to the mere romances which Geoffrey of Monmouth and the storytellers of his school imagined about the fictitious kings of England, from Brut to Lud. Already in the seventeenth century these sports of fancy were beginning to be appraised at their true value by scholars like Milton, who rehearsed but evidently did not believe them. Now, happily, no English historian thinks it necessary to waste his time and the time of his readers by proving their utter unreality. Still, no doubt the mind of every historical student longs for a continuous and rightly co-ordinated narrative of events, and dislikes to see the evidence presented in such disjointed fashion as that in which it has been here submitted to the reader. This however appears to be for the present a disagreeable necessity. Great danger seems to attend every attempt to make one plain story out of the various materials supplied to us by Bede, the Chronicle, Gildas and Nennius. It may be that the labours of future investigators may enable them to achieve this result; but the time is not yet.

One or two great landmarks may perhaps be accurately discerned through the mist. The united testimony of Prosper Tiro and the biographer of Germanus seems to justify us in asserting that the Saxon assaults upon Britain were contemporaneous with those of the Picts, and never really ceased throughout the first half of the fifth century. The allusion in the Chronicle to a burial of treasure and flight of the Romans in 418 perhaps refers to some otherwise unrecorded invasion of the Saxons and to a consequent emigration of the Romanised Britons to Gaul. That such an emigration on a large scale must have taken place somewhat early in the century seems to follow as a necessary consequence from the fact that the Armorican peninsula received then that name of Britannia, Bretagne or Brittany which in one shape or other it has ever since retained, and that already in 469 we find Apollinaris Sidonius speaking, as a matter of course, of the inhabitants of that region as Britons.[38]

There was probably an invasion of Kent in 441 by a Teutonic tribe, whom we may perhaps call Jutes, and this invasion was less of a mere piratical raid and more of an abiding conquest than the previous expeditions. We notice the same difference three centuries later in the Danish invasions. Vortigern is probably an historical character, and his marriage with the daughter of the Teutonic chief was the sort of event which might well strike the minds of contemporaries and linger long in the songs of later generations. Probably, however, he was not a “king”—Roman institutions would hardly have allowed of the formation so early of a regal dynasty—but a great and powerful landowner who armed his dependants and wielded practically something like kingly power. His invocation of Jutish aid to repel a Pictish invasion may be historically true, but far too much has doubtless been made of the whole affair by British fabulists, anxious to excuse the failure of their countrymen and determined to make the luckless Vortigern the scapegoat of their nation. “We were betrayed!” is the natural exclamation of every vanquished people.

Ambrosius Aurelianus, the descendant of Roman wearers of the purple, is almost certainly a historical personage, though it is impossible to fix the time and place of his operations. So, too, with a shade less of probability is Arthur, or Artorius, whom we may fairly credit with having stayed for a time the torrent of the Saxon advance by the great victory of the Mons Badonicus won at some time between 500 and 516. In both these British champions, however, we ought probably to see not Cymric kings, but Romano-British generals, wielding a power like that of the Roman duces and comites, and perhaps even commanding bodies of men trained in some of the traditions of the Roman legion. Most important, on this view of the case, are the words of Nennius himself: “Arthur fought against the Saxons along with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was Dux Bellorum”.

The short and business-like entries of the Chronicle as to the successive victories which marked the extension of the West Saxon kingdom seem in the main worthy of belief, though we cannot rely with much confidence on the dates attached to every entry. It does not surprise us to find no record of the Saxon defeat at the Mons Badonicus, nor, as has been said, does such silence lessen the probability of its having actually occurred. Ceawlin, the hero of the West Saxons, is undoubtedly a real figure in history, and we may in the main accept with confidence the history of his battles, especially of his crowning victory at Deorham, which undid the work of Mount Badon, and, by giving the command of the Severn Valley and the Bristol Channel to the Saxons, finally separated “West Wales” from Wales. The domestic strife which disastrously ended his career and hurled him from his throne is pretty clearly hinted at in the Chronicle, and we may be allowed to conjecture that it was the continuance of this internal discord which prevented for a long while the further development of Wessex; which made the rising power of Mercia instead of the West Saxon state the protagonist in the conflict with Wales; and which struck the annals of the latter kingdom in the seventh century with barrenness. When Ceawlin died, in 593, already the great pope who was to reunite Britain to Christian Europe was presiding over the Roman Church, and we may be said now at last to see land, the terra firma of authentic and continuous history.

On reviewing the whole course of the Teutonic conquest of our island we cannot fail to be struck by the different rates of speed at which that conquest proceeded at different times. By about the middle of the sixth century the invaders seem to have possessed themselves of nearly all the country lying to the east of a line drawn from Berwick-on-Tweed through Lichfield to Salisbury. After that period, however, their advance, never very rapid, becomes extremely slow. Wales the Saxons never conquered. “West Wales,” as Devon and Cornwall were called, were not subdued till the ninth century. Cumberland, which formed part of the Celtic kingdom of Strathclyde, does not seem to have become English till the close of the seventh century, and even then was very loosely joined to the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. It is to be hoped that we may one day obtain some clearer light on the reason for this great difference in the rate of conquest between the eastern and western halves of the island; how far it may have been due to the different resisting powers of two Celtic races, the “Brythonic” and “Goidelic”; whether earlier Saxon settlements along the shore of the German Ocean facilitated the work of the new invaders; or whether the flat alluvial lands of the east, more easily overrun by mounted bands of freebooters than the rough mountainous country of the west, were the chief factors in the problem.

A question which has been often and fiercely discussed and on which probably the last word has not yet been said is: “How far did the great movements of invasion which we have been discussing amount to an actual replacement of one population by another?” or, in other words: “Are the Englishmen of to-day pure Saxons and Angles or partly Celts?” In considering this question two factors have to be considered: (1) the amount of new population imported into the country; and (2) the degree to which the invaders carried the process of extermination of the older inhabitants. As to the first point we are furnished with extremely scanty information by all our authorities. The mythical “three keels” and “five keels,” which the chroniclers speak of as containing the whole forces of the invaders, point only to a scanty number of warriors, accompanied probably by their horses, but certainly not by their wives and children. The story of the legendary Rowena, on the other hand, suggests—what is doubtless the truth—that the invaders, once established in the land, sent speedily for the wives and daughters whom they had left by the Elbe or the Baltic. One late authority speaks of the Saxons as inviting over so many of their kith and kin that an island which they had previously inhabited was left almost void of people. Undoubtedly every indication of language and of later social state points to the conclusion that the invasions were not mere raids of freebooting warriors, but great national migrations such as were the fashion in the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ, such as Claudian describes as headed by Alaric and such as Ennodius paints in his laudation of Theodoric.

Moreover, even for such a great national displacement we may find a sufficient cause in the condition of central Europe between 432 and 452. During all these years the fear of the mighty Hunnish war-lord Attila lay like a nightmare upon Europe; not upon the Romanised men of the southern cities only, but quite as much upon the Teuton in his forests, for the Teuton loathed the very smell of the Hun, and, when forced to submit to him for a time, chafed under his yoke and as soon as possible escaped from his abhorred neighbourhood. Now when we find it stated by the Roman ambassadors to his court[39] that Attila had by the year 448 made “all the islands in the ocean” subject to him, we who know that the coasts of the Baltic, of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula were all looked upon as islands by the classical geographers, may not improbably conjecture that the pressure of the Hun was felt by the Angle and the Saxon as it had been felt before by his kinsmen the Goth and the Burgundian. We have every reason therefore to conjecture, if we cannot hold it for proved, that there was an immense transference of Teutonic family life from the lands bordering on the Elbe to the banks of the Thames, the Humber and the Tyne.

But it is on the second factor of the equation, on the extent of denudation of the older, the Celtic stratum of the people, that the controversy chiefly turns. The theory of the virtual extermination of the Britons from at least the eastern half of the island is thus stated by its most illustrious champion, Freeman: “Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of these parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be”. In support of this theory Freeman appeals to the absolutely Teutonic type of the language spoken by Englishmen before the Norman conquest, to the Teutonic character of their institutions and to the terrible entry in the Chronicle concerning the capture of Anderida: “491. Now Aella and Cissa encompassed Andredes-ceaster and slew off all that dwelt therein: nor was there afterward a single Briton left there.”

It cannot be said that the tendency of recent inquirers is in favour of so strong an assertion as this of the entire obliteration of the British element in any part of our island. Physiological investigations, the measurement of skulls and the examination of graves, do not confirm the hypothesis of the absolute disappearance anywhere of the pre-Saxon races. The study of institutions does not confirm it: the more closely these are examined the more does the conviction grow that some Roman or Celtic elements are imbedded in the generally Teutonic character of the Anglo-Saxon state. And even the celebrated passage concerning the slaughter at Anderida is not, perhaps, so conclusive an argument as it appears at first sight. Nothing is said there which necessarily implies a determination to destroy a whole people. We may see in it only the cruel action of assailants maddened by the stubborn defence of a fortress which may have long held the Saxons at bay; and even the fact of the emphatic mention in the Chronicle of this one bloody deed seems to imply that it was not the usual accompaniment of Saxon conquest.

When we examine carefully the pleadings on both sides we see that the disputants are not so far apart as they suppose themselves to be. No one denies that the general framework of society in Anglo-Saxon Britain, like the language, was Teutonic, or that the masters of the land were English and looked upon the Romanised Celts whom they called Wealas as an alien and inferior race. But, on the other hand, Freeman himself admits, though reluctantly, that the majority of the British women would be spared to be the wives or concubines of the invaders, and nearly all the slaves to be their thralls. This admission is fatal to the claim of the ordinary Englishman of to-day, after all the upheavings and down-sinkings of the various social strata, to be a pure-blooded Teuton. The evidence of language tends in the same direction. It is certainly surprising—and the advocates of the extirpation-theory have a right to point triumphantly to the fact—how small a number of Romano-Celtic words crept into the language spoken here before the Norman Conquest. But the words which did thus survive are, for the most part, such words as women would use in connexion with the affairs of the household, words like rasher and rug. When we thus review the circumstances of the Saxon conquest, and especially when we remember the immense influx of Celtic blood which we have received in later centuries from the Gael and the Erse folk, we may perhaps conclude that we should accept and glory in the term Anglo-Celt, rather than Anglo-Saxon, as the fitting designation of our race.

CHAPTER VII.
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE.

During the two centuries in which Britain had been forgotten by the rest of Europe, great events, most of them disastrous events, had been happening in the world. The imperial city, Rome, had been four times captured and plundered by barbarian armies. After the third of these captures (that by Totila in 546), we are told that the mighty city remained for six weeks absolutely empty of inhabitants, neither man nor beast being left therein. During these two centuries the vast empire of Attila the Hun which seemed likely at one time to be a universal monarchy had risen into greatness and had fallen into ruin; so, too, had risen and fallen the fair fabric raised in Italy by the converted barbarian Theodoric; Clovis the Frank had become, from chief of a petty principality, lord of a mighty realm, which under his sons had spread over the greater part of the two countries which we now call France and Germany; Justinian had framed his imperishable code, and the Bishop of Rome had become the unquestioned patriarch of the west.

Two references to our island made by the greatest historian of the period serve to emphasise its utter seclusion from the world of civilisation and culture. Procopius in his immortal history of the Gothic siege of Rome,[40] tells us that at a certain period of the blockade (537) when the Gothic leaders began to despair of taking the city they opened negotiations with Belisarius, the imperial general, and endeavoured to persuade him to retire from Italy on condition of receiving a formal cession of the island of Sicily. The absurdity of the suggestion consisted in this, that Sicily, which was the natural prize of the greatest sea power in the Mediterranean, was already hopelessly lost to the Gothic kingdom; and this fact gave point to the sarcastic reply of Belisarius: “And we, too, will allow the Goths to possess the whole island of Britain which is much larger than Sicily and which once belonged to the Romans, as Sicily once belonged to you. For when any one has received a favour it is fitting that he should repay it in kind.” So utterly had Britain fallen out of the orbit of the empire that a heroic Roman general could even afford to joke over its disappearance.

Again, towards the end of his history,[41] Procopius, who evidently wishes to follow the example of Herodotus in supplying his readers with the best information in his power about strange and savage lands, gives a detailed description of Britain. “It is divided into two parts by a wall built by ‘the men of old’. On the eastern side of that wall all is fresh and fair; neither heat nor cold excessive; fruits, harvests, men abound; a fertile soil is blessed with abundance of water. But on the western side things are altogether different, so that no man can live there even for half an hour. Numberless vipers and serpents and other venomous beasts abound there, and so pestilent is the air that the moment a man crosses the wall he dies.” Furthermore, a strange story was told concerning this island, for the truth of which Procopius does not vouch, but which he repeats lest he should be thought to be ignorant of a matter of common notoriety. “On the shore of the Channel opposite to Britain are many villages inhabited by fishermen who are exempt from the usual tribute ‘payable to the Kings of the Franks’ on condition of their undertaking in rotation the duty of rowing over to Britain the spirits of the dead. The boatman whose turn it is to undertake this duty lies down at nightfall to snatch a brief slumber. At dead of night a knock is heard at the door of his hut and a muffled voice calls him and his fellows forth to their duty. They see ships, not their own, anchored in the harbour. Embarking on these they seize the oars and push off from land; at once the ships, though apparently empty, are pressed down to the water’s edge by an unseen cargo. When they reach the shore of Britain a disembarkation as invisible as the embarkation takes place. They see no man; only a voice proclaims the names of the invisible passengers, the offices they held in life, the husbands of the dead wives, if any such should be among the number. Quickly do they return to the Gaulish shore, and now the ship is not sunk deeper than her keel.” Gladly would we learn in whose interest and at what period of the great struggle this wild story was put in circulation concerning a country which had been for at least three centuries in the full prosaic daylight of Roman civilisation.

It was probably about the year 553 that Procopius of Cæsarea wrote this strange story, worthy of the age of Orpheus and the Argonauts, concerning our ghostly island. Some twenty years later, the celebrated scene between Gregory and the fair-haired Yorkshire lads was enacted in the Roman forum.[42] We cannot avoid listening once more to the thousand times quoted words of Bede:—[43]

“I may not pass by in silence the event which according to the tradition of the elders was the cause of Gregory’s abiding interest in the salvation of our people. They say that on a certain day the news of the arrival of some merchants caused a concourse of intending purchasers to assemble in the forum where their goods were displayed. Among the rest came Gregory who saw there, beside the other market wares, certain boys set up for sale, with fair skins and beautiful faces, noticeable for their golden hair and comely shapes. When he beheld them, he asked from what part of the world they came. The merchant told him that they came from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants all presented the same appearance. Again he asked whether they were Christians, or still involved in the errors of Paganism. ‘They are Pagans,’ was the reply. Hereupon he heaved a sigh from his inmost heart, and said: ‘Alas! the pity of it! that the Prince of Darkness should own as his subjects men of such shining countenance, and that such grace of outward form should veil minds destitute of heavenly grace within’. Again he asked what was the name of that nation. The merchant answered: ‘They are called Angles’. ‘Well named,’ said he, ‘for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven. What is the name of that province from which they have been brought?’ ‘The inhabitants of that province are called Deiri.’ ‘Well again: rescued de ira and called out of wrath into the mercy of Christ. How is their king named?’ ‘Aelle.’ Playing on the name he said: ‘Alleluia. It must needs be that the praises of God the Creator resound in those regions.’”

It has been conjectured that the lads who stood on that fateful morning for sale in the Roman forum had lost their liberty owing to the wars waged between their lord, Aelle of Deira, and Ethelfrith of Bernicia. The grave and reverend ecclesiastic who spoke to them in that historic forum which still doubtless showed the senate-house and rostra of the republic, and was overlooked by the palaces of the empire, was a man who himself was sprung of a senatorial family and had worn the purple of the prefect of the city. A year or two, however, before the dialogue in the forum, about 575, he had laid aside that splendid robe and donned the coarse scapular of a Benedictine monk. His stately palace on the Cælian he had turned into a monastery, which still exists and bears his name, though originally dedicated to St. Andrew. Such was the man who, intensely Roman at heart as well as Christian, brought Britain once again within the attraction of Rome.

In the first fervour of his missionary zeal, Gregory himself started on the northward road, but was recalled by the command of the pope.[44] Then came the years which he spent as papal nuncio (apocrisiarius) at the splendid but not altogether friendly court of Constantinople; his return to Rome; his rule as abbot in his monastery; and lastly his election in 590 by the enthusiastic and unanimous voices of the people to the office of pope, vacant by the death of Pelagius II. Still the vision of the conversion of Britain remained dear to his heart; but in the distracted state of Italy, living, as he said, “between the swords of the Lombards,”[45] he was for some time unable to take any steps towards its fulfilment. In September, 595, he wrote to the steward of the papal estates in Gaul, directing him to buy as many English slaves as he could, of the age of seventeen or eighteen, that they might be distributed to various monasteries and there taught the elements of the Christian faith. The terms of this commission give us a strong impression of the regularity of the export of slaves from Britain to Gaul. And where such a regular slave-trade exists we may generally infer the prevalence of a chronic state of war.

At last, in 596, he sent forth his friend Augustine, prior of his monastery of St. Andrew’s, with a company of monks, upon the great enterprise. Augustine himself, a somewhat timorous and small-souled man, who lacked the great qualities of his patron, when he had reached the south of Gaul and heard from the bishops of that province dire stories of Saxon barbarism, turned faint-hearted, and conversation with his companions increased rather than allayed his fears. At last they came to the inglorious conclusion “that it would be safer to return home than to visit a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”. Augustine himself started on the return journey, bearer of the unanimous request that they might be excused from undertaking so perilous and laborious a mission, and one of such doubtful issue. Probably he had not reached Rome when he received a letter (dated July 23, 596) in which the pope informed the whole company that it would have been better never to have begun a good work than to turn back disheartened from its accomplishment. He exhorted them not to be daunted by the difficulties of the journey, nor discouraged by the words of evil-speaking men, but to press on with zeal to finish the work which God had given them to do; knowing that the greater the labour the richer would be the eternal recompense of reward. At the same time a letter of commendation to Etherius, Archbishop of Arles, probably smoothed their labours and did something to allay their fears.

In truth the mission upon which the trembling monks were despatched, though of immense importance, was one of no great danger, and it would probably be safe to say that the missionaries of all the Christian Churches have in the last two centuries cheerfully faced greater perils and undergone greater hardships in the service of the Gospel of Christ, than were the portion of Augustine and his friends. Ethelbert, the king of Kent, whose court was the objective of their campaign, was far the most powerful of the English kings, and in his reign, which had now lasted more than thirty years, he had, we are told, “stretched the bounds of his empire as far as the river Humber”.[46] His wife, Bertha, daughter of Charibert, king of the Franks, and grand-daughter of Clovis, was allowed to worship after the Christian manner without let or hindrance, having her own private chaplain, Bishop Liudhard, and we may fairly suppose that the messengers who came to preach the same faith, bringing introductions from Frankish kings and prelates as well as from the great Bishop of Rome, were safe from insult or molestation in the wide region included in the over-lordship of her husband, the limits of which they probably never overstepped.

At last after long and leisurely journeyings, visits to the courts of Frankish kings, and the formation of a staff of interpreters, Augustine and his companions, forty in number, landed, apparently in the spring of 597, on the shores of Britain. Their landing-place was in that extreme north-eastern corner of Kent which still bears the name of the Isle of Thanet, though it has lost its insular character. In the seventh century the little stream of the Stour, which flows round this region and which then emptied itself into the channel called the Wantsum, was a considerable river, probably tidal, 600 yards broad and fordable only in two places. Thus Thanet was then a genuine island, and here Augustine and his little band took up their temporary quarters. Sending some of their Frankish interpreters to Ethelbert they informed him that they had come from Rome, the bearers of the best of all good news, and that if he would hearken to their counsels they could without any doubt promise him eternal happiness in heaven and a future kingdom without end in the presence of the living and true God. The king replied with words courteous but cautious: “Remain in that island in which you now are, while I consider what I shall do with you. Meanwhile I will supply you with the necessaries of life.” After certain days Ethelbert crossed the Wantsum and held a conference with the strangers. The place of meeting was fixed in the open air, for the old king, notwithstanding his life-long intercourse with Christians, feared that he should be fascinated by magical arts if he met the missionaries within doors. Soon Augustine and his forty companions were seen to approach, bearing on high a silver cross by way of banner and a painted picture of the Saviour, and chanting litanies, in which they prayed the Lord to grant eternal life to themselves and to those for whose sake they had come from far. At the king’s command they took their seats, and then one of their number, probably Augustine himself, through the medium of an interpreter, set forth to the king “how the mild-hearted Saviour by His own throes of suffering redeemed this guilty world and opened the kingdom of heaven to believing men”. The king replied: “Fair are the words which you speak and the promises which you make to me, but since they are new and vague I cannot give my assent to them, nor leave those rites which I, together with the whole English nation, have so long practised. But since you have come from so far, and, as I perceive, desire to share with us that which you hold to be best and truest, we will not be grievous unto you, but rather receive you with friendly hospitality and make it our business to supply you with needful food; nor will we forbid you to attach to yourselves all whom you can, by your preaching, win over to your faith.”

Herewith, permitting them to leave the Isle of Thanet, he assigned them quarters in the capital of his kingdom. This was the once insignificant town of Durovernis, situated at the point where the Roman road to Richborough diverged from the road between London and Dover. As the capital of the Jutish kingdom this roadside station had already attained to some importance under the name of Cantwaraburh, but showed little promise of the world-wide fame which it was to achieve under its more modern name of Canterbury. As the missionary band approached their destined home they raised aloft the silver crucifix and the picture, chanting with one accord a litany which may be thus translated:—

From this city, Lord! we pray

May Thy wrath be turned away.

We have sinned: but let Thy pity

Spare Thy house in yonder city.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

This litany was one which had been sung for more than a century on Rogation days in the churches of Gaul, and we must not, therefore, seek in its words for any special application to the little Saxon city towards which the missionaries were gazing. As it happened, however, there was already in that city a Christian church, erected probably in the very last years of the Roman occupation of Britain,[47] and dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. Here Ethelbert’s queen had since her marriage been allowed to attend a Christian service, celebrated by her Frankish chaplain, Liudhard. It was the opinion of Pope Gregory that the Frankish ecclesiastics of Gaul had been somewhat neglectful of their duties in reference to their heathen neighbours of Britain, and probably the court chaplain Liudhard was not altogether exempt from this reproach. However this may be, the church of St. Martin, now handed over to the Roman mission, became a centre of religious activity. The preaching and the prayers, the vigils and the fasts of the white-robed strangers, their patient and self-denying life, their professed willingness to suffer death itself on behalf of the Christian faith, produced a great impression on the minds of the men of Kent, rough doubtless and barbarous, but able to appreciate that which they beheld of noble and godlike. They began to flock to the church and crave the administration of baptism; and at last even the king presented himself at the sacred font and received baptism at the hands of Augustine. From that day the process of conversion went on rapidly, but we are assured that no pressure was put by the king on his subjects to compel them to follow his example, “since he had learned from his teachers that the service of Christ must be a voluntary matter and not a thing of compulsion”. He at once, however, provided the missionaries with a residence in Canterbury suitable to their dignity, and notwithstanding their life of abstinence and renunciation he made to them grants of lands in various districts, thus beginning that series of donations to the Church by Anglo-Saxon kings which was continued by them for near five centuries with splendid liberality, and the carefully preserved records of which constitute one of our most valuable sources of information on the social condition of England before the Norman conquest.

The mission having thus far met with such marvellous success Augustine felt that the time was come for him to assume a regular ecclesiastical position, and accordingly he journeyed to Arles, where the archbishop of that see, in accordance with orders received from Gregory, consecrated him as archbishop of the English nation.[48] Divers doubts and questionings having occurred to the soul of the new metropolitan he despatched, about 600, two of his brethren, Laurentius and Peter, to lay his difficulties before his Roman patron. The questions asked are of an extraordinary kind, and startle us by their strange juxtaposition of things momentous and things indifferent. Thus a question whether it is permissible for two brothers to marry two sisters, to whom they themselves stand in no kind of relationship, is followed by another, whether a man may be permitted to many his father’s widow. It is difficult to believe that the framer of such a question can have even read St. Paul’s letters to the Christians of Corinth. However, if the archbishop’s questions seem to us rather surprising, the pope’s answers are noble and statesmanlike. Especially memorable is his answer to the inquiry: “The faith being one, what can I say as to the diverse customs of the Churches, as, for instance, where the mass is celebrated in one way in the Holy Roman Church and in another way in the Churches of Gaul?” Pope Gregory replied, “You, my brother, know well the custom of the Roman Church in which you were reared. But my pleasure is that you should anxiously select whatever custom you may find, whether in the Roman or in the Gaulish or any other Church, which is pleasing to Almighty God, and teach the customs which you have thus gathered from many Churches to the Church of the Angles, which is yet new to the faith. For things are not to be prized according to the places from which they originate, but places are to be loved according to the good things to which they give birth.”

The letter containing these answers was carried, not by the returning messengers of Augustine, but by a fresh mission from Rome, consisting of Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinianus. They brought with them also a woollen pallium for Augustine, the symbol of his archiepiscopal dignity, many relics of saints and ornaments for the churches and the precious gift of a large number of manuscripts. While entrusting Augustine with the precious pallium, a gift which he was somewhat chary of bestowing, Pope Gregory at the same time provided for the erection of an archiepiscopal see at Eburacum. In future, after Augustine’s own death, the archiepiscopate of the south was to be placed at Lundonia; and thereafter London and York, the two archiepiscopal centres of their respective provinces, were to have equal power, priority of dignity being assigned to whichever prelate might happen to have been first ordained. The messengers brought also letters specially directed to the King and Queen of Kent. In the letter to Ethelbert, Gregory struck a note which was often heard in his correspondence: “Moreover, we wish your Glory to know that, as we are assured in Holy Scripture by the words of Almighty God, the end of this present world is nigh at hand and the unending reign of the Saints is about to begin. Before that day comes many things must come to pass such as have not yet been seen: changes in the air, terrors in the sky, tempests out of season, wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes. All these things, it is true, will not happen in our own day, but after our days they will follow.” In the letter to Bertha, the pope, while gently hinting that one so well grounded in the true faith ought long ago to have effected the conversion of her husband, praises her for what she has done in protecting and befriending the missionaries; exhorts her to use all her influence in order to keep her husband steadfast in the faith. He assures her that her memory will be revered like that of Helena who turned her son Constantine to Christianity, and that the fame of her great work has reached not only to Rome but even to Constantinople (delightful thought for the daughter of barbarian kings), and that its completion will bring joy to the angels in heaven.

In a letter addressed to the messenger Mellitus, containing some thoughts which had come into the pope’s mind during his long musings after the departure of his legation, Gregory desires him to direct Augustine on no account to destroy the temples of the idols, but to sprinkle them with holy water, construct altars and enrich them with relics. The old pagan sacrifices of animals to their false gods are, of course, to cease, but as a sort of concession to the festive propensities of the converts, on the day of the dedication of the church or on the birthday of the martyr whose relics were there deposited, the people were to be encouraged to make little huts of boughs all round the newly consecrated church, and therein, after slaying animals for feasting, not for sacrifice, to express with joy and gladness of heart their gratitude to the Giver of every good gift. A remembrance of the Jewish feast of tabernacles seems to cross the mind of the pontiff as he thus ordains the conversion of pagan sacrifices into Christian festivities.

The story of the conversion of the English nation to Christianity is an interesting one, and if at this point of our narrative religious topics seem to claim too large a share of our attention, it must be remembered that our chief, almost our only authority for this period is the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede, a splendid piece of historical work, but still one which, by the law of its being, concerns itself rather with the Church than with the State. Church affairs, however, sometimes throw an important light on political changes. We should be in entire ignorance as to the time and manner of the conquest of London by the invaders but for Bede’s information that: “Augustine ordained Mellitus as bishop (604), and sent him to preach in the province of the East Saxons, who are separated from Kent by the river Thames and are close to the eastern sea. Their metropolis is the city of Lundonia, situated on the banks of the aforesaid river and itself the mart of many nations flocking thither by land and sea: over which people [the East Saxons] at that time Saberct reigned, nephew of Ethelbert through his sister Ricula. He was, however, in a subordinate position to Ethelbert, who, as has been already said, ruled all the races of the English up to the river Humber. When, therefore, that province [Essex] had received the word of truth from the preaching of Mellitus, Ethelbert built in the city of Lundonia a church to the holy apostle Paul, in which was fixed the episcopal seat of Mellitus and his successors.”

At the same time Augustine consecrated Justus, who, as we have seen, was a colleague of Mellitus in the Roman legation, Bishop of Dorubrevi, “which from an old chieftain of theirs named Hrof the English nation calls Hrofaescaestre” (Rochester). These two bishoprics, Canterbury and Rochester, both founded in the one kingdom of Kent, seem to represent a certain political duality in that region,[49] as if it were the normal state of affairs that East and West Kent should have separate rulers. However this may be, it is well for us to bear in mind that the title of king was one of rather vague significance. Besides the great and powerful kings of the eight chief provinces there was many a cluster of petty princes dignified with the name of kings, of whom the national history can take no notice, but whose names figure royally in charters and testamentary documents.

It was probably soon after the arrival of the messengers from Rome, and to some extent in compliance with Gregory’s wishes, that some important but, unhappily, resultless overtures were made by Augustine to the rulers of the Welsh Church. Using the powerful advocacy of Ethelbert, he invited the doctors and bishops of the British province to meet him about the year 602 at a place in the west of England which was known long after as “Augustine’s oak”. There Augustine addressed the Welsh ecclesiastics and besought them to enter into the Catholic peace, and undertake with him a common labour for the conversion of the heathen. The chief point on which he insisted was the necessity of their conforming to the Roman practice in the calculation of Easter, a wearisome matter of debate as to which we shall hear more than enough in the century of Anglian history that now lies before us. When argument failed, the Roman advocate proposed to have recourse to miracle: “Let some sick man be brought into our midst, and the party whose prayers avail to heal him shall be deemed to be the advocates of the cause approved by God”. Unwillingly the Britons consented. A blind Englishman was introduced into the assembly. The prayers of the Welshmen failed to restore him to sight, but the prayers of Augustine, we are told, succeeded. Then, it is said, the Britons professed to be convinced that the course recommended by Augustine was the way of righteousness, but declared that they could not, without the consent of their countrymen, abandon their ancient customs. They therefore pleaded for a second conference, which was to be held at some place which is not named, and was to be attended by a much larger body of clergy.

To this second conference came seven bishops from Wales, possibly including some from Cornwall, and a whole troop of learned doctors, most of whom hailed from the great and noble monastery of Bangor.[50] On their way to the council they turned aside to ask the advice of a certain holy hermit, whether they should hold fast their old traditions or accept the teaching of Augustine. “If he is a man of God,” said he, “of course you must follow him.” “But how can we prove whether he be or no?” The answer showed a rare insight into the true spirit of Christianity: “The Lord said: Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. If, therefore, this Augustine is meek and lowly of heart, it is probable that he bears the yoke of Christ himself and offers it to you to share it with him. But if he is proud and discourteous, he is not of God and we need not care for his words.... Arrange therefore, that he shall first reach the place of meeting, and if, when you draw near, he rises to receive you, be assured that he is a servant of Christ and listen to him with deference, but if he despises you and does not choose to rise to you who are the larger party, then let him be despised by you.” So it came to pass. The Britons when they arrived found Augustine seated on a chair of state, and he made no motion to arise therefrom. His demeanour may have been the result of shyness or absence of mind, but they set it down to pride, and being filled with wrath they made a point of contradicting everything that he said. Soon doubtless the dispute waxed warm, and cries of “Quarto-deciman,” “The last quarter of the waning moon,” “The cycle of eighty-four years,” “The cycle of eighteen years,” “The blessed apostle John,” “The prince of the apostles, Peter,” with every variety of intonation, from the sharp notes of the Italian cleric to the gruff voices of the Celtic mountaineer, resounded through the air. Augustine seems to have done his best, too late, to calm the ruffled spirits of his hearers. “Ye do many things,” he said, “contrary to our custom: nay, contrary to the custom of the universal Church, but if on three points ye will hearken to me we will patiently bear your divergence on all others. These three points are, that ye shall celebrate Easter at its own right time: that ye shall administer baptism according to the usage of the Apostolical Roman Church,[51] and that ye shall join with us in preaching the word of the Lord to the English nation.” The Cambrians, however, refused to comply with any of these conditions or to accept Augustine as their archbishop, muttering one to another: “He would not even rise to receive us when we were strangers: if we once submit ourselves to his authority he will treat us as the dust under his feet”. Before the disputants parted from one another, Augustine raised his voice in threatening prophecy: “If you will not accept peace with your brethren, you will have to accept war with your enemies: and if you will not preach the way of life to the English nation, you shall suffer from their hands the requital of death”. A prophecy which Bede considered to have afterwards received its fulfilment in the bloody battle of Chester.

It certainly must raise our opinion of the absolute honesty of Bede as a historian to find him, whose sympathies are all on the side of Roman as against British Christianity, thus faithfully describing a scene in which his hero Augustine certainly plays an unattractive part. The Welshmen may have erred in attributing his conduct to pride, but his most ardent champions must admit that he showed a grievous want of tact in this important interview. It was a golden opportunity that was offered for the reconciliation of two great hostile races at the feet of one Saviour, and that opportunity once lost never returned. The wound which the Saxon invasions had caused, still comparatively fresh, might possibly have been then healed by first intention. Unhealed then, it went festering on for centuries; and more than once or twice since the days of Augustine, Christianity, which ought to be the great reconciler of men, has proved itself the great divider between Celt and Saxon. Soon probably after this fatal interview, Augustine died (May 26, 605?), and was succeeded in his archiepiscopal see by his friend Laurentius, a companion of his labours from the beginning, and the man whom he had himself in his lifetime ordained to be his successor.

The death of Ethelbert of Kent, which occurred in February 24, 616, about eleven years after that of Augustine, serves as the occasion to our one most trusted authority for giving us some valuable information as to the political condition of our island. It will be well therefore to translate in full a few sentences from the Ecclesiastical History.

“In the year of our Lord’s Incarnation, 616, Aedilberct [Ethelbert], King of the Cantwaras, after a glorious reign on earth of fifty-six years, entered the eternal joys of the heavenly kingdom. He was the third among the kings of the English nation who ruled over all their southern provinces which are separated from the northern ones by the river Humber, and the boundaries adjoining: but he was the first of all to mount to the Kingdom of Heaven. [He came, as I have said, third in the other list.] For the first to wield dominion of this kind was Aelle, King of the South Saxons; the second Caelin, King of the West Saxons, who was called Ceawlin in their language; the third, as we have said, Aedilberct, King of the Cantwaras; the fourth who possessed it was Redwald, King of the East Angles, who even in the lifetime of Aedilberct won the leadership for that same nation of his.” Bede then proceeds to give us the names of three more leader-kings—names which will figure largely in the following chapters of this history—Aeduini (Edwin), Oswald and Oswiu (Oswy), all kings of Northumbria.

The Chronicle when it has to speak of Egbert the West Saxon and his acquisition of supreme power over the English people, remarks that “he was the eighth king that was Bretwalda” (or according to a better attested reading Brytenwealda), and then repeats the above list as given by Bede, adding Egbert’s name at its close. On the strength of this passage historians have concluded, no doubt rightly, that Bretwalda or some similar word was the title given to these exceptionally powerful English kings whom we find from time to time during the period of the so-called Heptarchy wielding practically the whole power of English Britain, and this idea of a “Britain-wielder” seems to be now generally accepted as explanatory of the name. There has been much discussion as to the attributes of this Bretwalda sovereignty of Britain, but it cannot be said that any very definite conclusion has yet been arrived at. It was probably what the Greeks called a “hegemony,” rather than a formal and constituted sovereignty: a leadership and preponderating influence such as the King of Prussia possessed in Germany even before he was formally proclaimed emperor. It will be observed that during Ethelbert’s reign his nephew, the East Anglian Redwald, won the leadership from him. Evidently there were some unrecorded vicissitudes in the life of Ethelbert.

The death of Ethelbert (who had married a second wife after the decease of Frankish Bertha) seems to have been shortly followed by that of his nephew, Saberct the East Saxon. Now was it too plainly seen how slight a hold the new religion, promoted as it had been by royal favour and the fashion of a court, had upon the hearts of the people. The hegemony of Kent, sapped as it had apparently been in the lifetime of Ethelbert, entirely disappeared at his death. Moreover his son Eadbald, who had set his heart on wedding his widowed stepmother, and who could by no means induce Archbishop Laurentius to sanction such an incestuous union, openly revolted from the Church and went back to paganism. In the frequent fits of insanity by which he was afterwards afflicted, the faithful saw the work of unclean spirits and the permitted chastisement of his sin.

Nor did affairs go better for Christianity in the neighbouring kingdom of Essex. King Saberct had left three sons, joint-successors to his kingdom, who during their father’s lifetime had yielded a sort of fitful adherence to Christianity, but had not submitted to the rite of baptism and remained apparently pagans at heart. Their quarrel with Mellitus, Bishop of London, arose out of his refusal to permit them to partake of the communion. They saw the bishop standing at the altar administering the eucharist to the people; and “Why,” demanded they in angry tones, “do you not give us some of that pure white bread which you used to give to our father, and which we see you still handing forth to the people?” Mellitus explained that it was not permitted to give the bread except to those who had undergone the rite of baptism; but they persisted that they had no need of baptismal purification, yet meant to have a share of the consecrated bread. When Mellitus still refused they said: “If you will not gratify us in so small a matter you shall not stay in our province,” and drove him forth from their kingdom. Mellitus, arriving in Kent, conferred with his brethren, Laurentius and Justus, as to what should be done in the face of the gathering storm-clouds. They unanimously came to the conclusion that the better course was to return to their own country, and there serve God with unharassed minds, rather than abide in that barbarous land and carry on their fruitless labours among a population rebellious to the faith. Mellitus and Justus accordingly left their respective sees and betook themselves to Gaul, meaning there to abide till the hourly expected end of the world, of which Gregory had so often warned them, should be revealed. Shortly after their departure the three arrogant East Saxon kings who had expelled Mellitus fell in battle against the Gewissas or men of Wessex. But though the idolatrous rulers were gone, their influence upon the people remained, and it was long before the city of London could be persuaded to tolerate in its midst the votaries of the new faith.

Thus it seemed that the seed sown by Augustine, which had sprung up so quickly, having no deepness of earth, was about to wither away as quickly before the parching blasts of persecution. A dream, or a trance, or a mysterious mental struggle through which Archbishop Laurentius passed, prevented the utter abandonment of the great enterprise. In the night before his intended departure from Britain, having laid him down to rest in a chamber of the monastery dedicated by Augustine to St. Peter and St. Paul, Laurentius saw in a vision the Apostle Peter who indignantly rebuked him for his faint-hearted desertion of the flock committed to his care. With every sentence came a blow from the apostolic scourge on the shoulders of the faint-hearted archbishop, and this chastisement endured through many hours of the secret and solitary night. In the morning Laurentius found that his back was covered with wales from St. Peter’s lash, and going straight to the palace he showed his wounds to the king. Eadbald asked in wrath who had dared thus to chastise so eminent a man, and being told that it was the long dead apostle of Christ, he was stricken with fear, abandoned his idolatrous rites, put away his forbidden wife, received baptism, and thenceforward promoted to the utmost of his power the cause of the new religion.[52]

Thus then Laurentius did not take his hand from the plough. His brethren, Mellitus and Justus, were recalled by Eadbald from Gaul, but the newly converted king, less powerful than his father, availed not to persuade the stubborn Londoners to receive Mellitus into their midst. Not long after (February 2, 619) Laurentius himself died, and was succeeded in the archiepiscopal see by Mellitus. He too died (April 24, 624) after a five years’ tenure of office, and was succeeded by Justus. Thus, one after another, Pope Gregory’s missionaries were passing away, and their bodies were laid in the portico which, like the great atrium of the church of St. Ambrose at Milan, stood in front of the slowly reared church of St. Peter and St. Paul. But the Christianity of the Saxons in the south was still but a sickly and shallow-rooted plant. It was left for the Angles of Northumbria to show a genuine, hearty, popular conversion to the new faith, and to produce that splendid series of saintly kings, bishops and princesses who have made the seventh century for ever memorable in the history of English Christianity.

CHAPTER VIII.
EDWIN OF DEIRA.

As our attention in dealing with the history of the seventh century will now be fixed chiefly on Northumbria, that being the region where Christianity won its most glorious victories and as it was at this time undoubtedly the predominant state in Britain, it is necessary at the cost of a little repetition to describe the course of the English settlements in that northern land. And first, a word as to its geographical limits. The district which was popularly called Northhymbraland, and which consisted politically of the two kingdoms of Beornice (Bernicia) and Dearnerice (Deira), stretched from the Firth of Forth to the river Humber. It is important to remember that we have here no concern with the medieval and modern boundary between England and Scotland, in which Tweed and Cheviot are the principal factors. St. Cuthbert, born on the slopes of the Lammermoor Hills, was no Scot but an Englishman; and Edinburgh, which is to us the very type and symbol of Scotticism, was in all probability founded by the English prince whose name stands at the head of this chapter. Between these two great natural frontiers, the Forth and the Humber, the bounding lines ran—as they still do, more than is generally recognised—north and south rather than east and west. The western half of the lowlands of Scotland, together with Westmorland and the greater part of Cumberland, formed the British kingdom of Strathclyde, and was—with the exception of some intervals of subjection to its Anglian neighbours—under the rule of kings of Celtic race, whose capital was the strong rock-fortress of Alclyde or Dumbarton. South of the kingdom of Strathclyde the high land which now sunders Yorkshire from Lancashire probably formed for some generations the boundary between the Angles and the Britons; yet not even up to that boundary was the Anglian dominion pushed in the first invasion, for we hear indistinctly of a British kingdom of Elmet, otherwise called Loidis, which probably included at any rate the upper part of the valleys of the Wharfe, the Aire and the Calder, all Yorkshire streams. As to the boundary between the two Anglian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira we cannot speak with absolute certainty, but we are told on trustworthy authority[53] that it was the River Tees. The fact that both kingdoms were so often united under one sovereign perhaps made the assignment of precise boundaries less needful. Thus, to recapitulate these facts in terms of modern geography, Bernicia included probably all the three Lothians, the counties of Berwick, Peebles and Roxburgh, the eastern half of Northumberland and the county of Durham; while Deira claimed the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire.

Surveying the ethnological condition of this region during the fifth and sixth centuries we can dimly discern a few important changes. There are some indications of a settlement of Frisians in that which we now call the Border country, and it is thought that they gave their name to the town of Dumfries. The time of their migration, however, is altogether uncertain, and as they were a Low German tribe, nearly allied in blood to both Angles and Saxons, we may conjecture that in the course of generations they so melted into the great Anglian population by which Bernicia was overrun as to be indistinguishable therefrom. Another national movement, about which we have more certain information, was that migration of the Pictic chief Cunedag from Lothian to Anglesey, about 380, to which attention has already been called, and which gave to Wales a line of sovereigns that endured for nine centuries. Then followed, about the middle of the fifth century, that settlement of the Jutes on the east coast of Scotland to which reference was made in our sixth chapter, and of which Hengest’s son and nephew, Octha and Ebissa, were leaders. This settlement is mentioned only by Nennius, but as we meet with it in that part of his history which is borrowed from an earlier Northumbrian annalist, we may probably accept it as historic fact that the Jutes thus bore a part in the migrations which Teutonised the eastern half of Caledonia as well as Britannia. Octha is spoken of in a later chapter of Nennius as having passed over from the northern part of Britain into Kent on the death of his father Hengest, and become the ancestor of the kings of Kent who were reigning in the historian’s lifetime.

In the shadowy traditions of the Welsh bards we hear of a certain Ossa Cyllelawr or Ossa the Knife-man, who is spoken of as a great antagonist of Arthur, and who appears to be a genuine progenitor of the Bernician kings. It is apparently his son Eobba who bears the terrible title, “The Great Burner of Towns,” which is generally given to the next link in the pedigree, Ida, King of Bernicia. Here, at last, we are on firmer historical ground, for this is that Ida of whom we read in the Chronicle (here quoting Bede) that “he began to reign in 547, and that from him sprang the royal line of Northumbria,” that “he reigned twelve years, and that he built Bebbanburh [Bamburgh], which was at first surrounded by a hedge and thereafter with a wall”.[54] Notwithstanding the comparative shortness of his reign, Bernician Ida from his rock-fortress of Bamburgh evidently wielded a mighty power, and we are probably right in attributing to him the first great extension and consolidation of the Anglian power between the Tees and the Firth of Forth. He had twelve sons, six of whom followed him in rather quick succession during the last half of the sixth century. We have no hint of civil war or domestic treason, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that many of these warlike kings fell in battle with their Celtic neighbours in the west. This is indeed hinted by the scanty notices in Nennius’s history.

We appear to be justified in speaking of Ida as king of Northumbria, though that may not have been the title given to him by his contemporaries, for it seems to be the outcome of the very confused notices in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum that Deira as well as Bernicia was subject to his sway. But on the death of Ida (560), if we may trust the Chronicle, a prince of another line claiming descent from Woden through eleven generations of mortal men, Aelle or Ella, began to reign over the southern kingdom, Deira, and reigned for twenty-eight years. Were the relations between the two dissevered kingdoms friendly or hostile? It is impossible to say. The presence of the Deiran slave boys in the Roman forum suggests the latter hypothesis; the fact that Acha, the daughter of Aelle, was married to Ethelfrid of Bernicia suggests the former. Possibly a war between the two Anglian kingdoms had been followed by peace and a matrimonial alliance. However this may be, on the death of Aelle in 588, Ethelric of Bernicia, son of Ida, succeeded—assuredly not peaceably—to the throne of Deira, which, after five years of reigning, he handed on together with his ancestral kingdom to his son Ethelfrid.

The reign of Ethelfrid which lasted for twenty-four years, from 593 to 617, was undoubtedly an important period in the history of Northumbria. We are apt to think of him only in connexion with that relentless persecution of his young brother-in-law, Edwin, which we shall soon have to consider; but he was certainly a powerful ruler, this fierce pagan sovereign of Northumbria. Read what Bede the Northumbrian, who had often heard his name mentioned with reluctant admiration in the cloisters of Jarrow and Wearmouth, says concerning him: “In these days the kingdom of the Northumbrians was governed by Ethelfrid, a most valiant king and most covetous of glory, who, more than all the chiefs of the Angles, harassed the nation of the Britons, so that it would seem fitting to compare him to Saul, King of Israel, except for this one point that he was ignorant of the Divine religion. For no ealdorman or king made wider tracts of land, after destroying or subduing their inhabitants, either tributary to the English nation or open to their occupation, than this king. So that the blessing which the patriarch, anticipating the deeds of Saul, bestowed on his own son might fittingly be applied to Ethelfrid: ‘Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf. In the morning he shall devour the prey: in the evening he shall divide the spoils.’”

In the year 603, when Ethelfrid had been ten years on the throne, “Aidan, King of the Scots who inhabit Britain,”[55] resenting the Anglian king’s encroachments, prepared to invade Bernicia. Here at last we have the word Scots clearly used not of our western but of our northern neighbours. For these are the Scots who crossed over the straits between Ulster and Cantyre and founded in Argyll and the Isles that kingdom of Dalriada which was one day to give a monarch, Kenneth MacAlpine, to the whole of North Britain and impose on Caledonia the name of Scotland. It is important also to observe that by this time all the dwellers in what we now call Scotland professed the Christian faith, the great mission of St. Columba to the Northern Picts and his settlement in Iona having taken place in 565, thirty-eight years before the events with which we are now concerned. The invasion of King Aidan, the friend and in a certain sense the nominee of St. Columba, though made by him at the head of a huge host, proved unsuccessful. He was met (says the patriotic Englishman Bede) by Ethelfrid with but few men. The two armies joined battle at Degsastan, probably the high moorland which forms the watershed between Liddesdale and Upper Tynedale, and which by one little stream, the Dawston Burn, still preserves the name of that old battlefield of the nations. Ethelfrid’s brother, Theodbald, with all the division of the army which he commanded, fell before the Scottish onslaught, but in another part of the field Aidan suffered so severe a defeat that he was forced to fly ignominiously from the bleak moorland, covered with the corpses of his followers. The battle of Dawston Rig seems to have been in truth the Flodden of the seventh century. Bede, writing 128 years afterwards, says: “Never from that day to this, hath any king of the Scots dared to join battle in Britain with the nation of the Angles”.

Some years after this victory over the Scots, Ethelfrid won another of equal importance over the Cambrian Britons (613?). The Archbishop Augustine, as we have seen, in his last conference with the Welsh ecclesiastics, warned them that if they were unwilling to preach the way of life to the English nation they should suffer a bloody requital at their hands.[56] And now Ethelfrid, having all the hosts of Deira and Bernicia at his disposal, collecting a large army, marched, probably by a branch of the Watling Street,[57] from York across Yorkshire to Manchester, and appeared full of the menace of battle before the walls of the city on the Dee, which, once known as Deva, now, 200 years after the last Roman soldiers had quitted Britain, still bore the name of the Camp of the Legions. In later times this name—Caerlegion in Welsh, Legacaestir in the English tongue—has been shortened to Chester, and thus this picturesque old city, which still keeps its medieval walls and is crowded with interesting relics both of Roman and of Norman domination, claims not unworthily the right to be the Chester among all the many Chesters in our land, the representative of all the cities which have arisen on the site of the camps of the legions.

On the eve of the battle, Ethelfrid descried a number of men clad in priestly garb who occupied what they deemed to be a place of safe shelter at a little distance from the British army. They were in fact a large deputation from the monastery of Bangor (which contained not fewer than 2,100 inmates), and they had come, sanctified by a three days’ fast, to aid the British king Brochmail by their prayers. “Who are those men?” cried Ethelfrid, “and what do they there?” Learning the reason of their presence, he exclaimed, “If they are calling on their God against us, they also are fighting against us, though it be not with arms but with curses,” and he directed the first movements of his army against them. This unexpected opening of the game seems to have confounded Brochmail, who is accused by Bede of having in cowardly panic forsaken the holy men whom he was especially bound to protect. However this may be, 1,200 of the Bangor monks were slain and only fifty escaped. The British king and his men fled in disgraceful rout; Ethelfrid’s victory was complete; the city of the legions was taken and sacked and remained apparently “a waste Chester” for near 300 years.

Thus for more than twenty years had Ethelfrid of Bamburgh marched from victory to victory. Meanwhile his foe and brother-in-law, Edwin, son of Ella, the rightful heir of Deira, was leading the life of a hunted fugitive, “an ascender of the stairs of other men,” hearing perchance of the victories of the enemy of his house, as Charles Stuart in his places of refuge in Holland or France heard of the triumphant campaigns of Cromwell. There is, indeed, a tradition that Edwin, when a boy, had sought shelter at the court of Cadvan, the British king of North-West Wales, and that this was the cause of Ethelfrid’s vigorous assault on the British confederacy; but this story seems hardly consistent with the pagan character of Edwin’s upbringing. For some time he seems to have sought shelter with a sovereign of the new and rising state of Mercia, whose daughter he married; but probably on her death he wandered forth again into exile. And thus after long and various experiences of the sad life of a fugitive in different kingdoms of the land, he found his way to the court of Redwald, King of the East Angles, and received a promise of protection from that powerful monarch. When Ethelfrid, however, heard that his hated rival was harboured at the East Anglian court, he sent messenger upon messenger to Redwald, offering him large bribes to take the life of his youthful guest. Long did Redwald refuse to do anything that would bring so dark a stain upon his kingly honour, but at last the third messenger, who brought not only more magnificent bribes, but the threat of war in the event of refusal, prevailed. In the first watch of the night an East Anglian noble, friendly to Edwin, entered the fugitive’s bedroom, called him forth outside the palace, told him his danger, counselled him to flee, and promised to lead him to a safe hiding-place, where neither Redwald nor Ethelfrid would be able to find him. Edwin thanked him for his warning, but refused to be the first to break covenant with his host by showing a doubt of his protection, and wearily exclaimed: “If I must die let me die here, rather than begin again that life of a fugitive which I have already led for so many years in every province of Britain”. His friend left him and he remained alone with his sad thoughts in the darkening night.

Suddenly a man whose face and garb were alike unknown to him, stood before him and asked him why he sat there so mournfully on his seat of stone, while all within the palace were wrapped in sleep. “What is it to thee,” said the weary exile, “where I choose to spend the night?” “But I know,” answered the stranger, “both why thou art here, and why thou art so sad and what thou fearest. Now what wouldst thou give to any one who should free thee from thy anxieties and persuade Redwald not to deliver thee into the hands of thy enemies?” “All that I possess,” said Edwin. “And what if he assured thee that thou shouldst overcome thine enemies and become a king greater than any English king before thee?” “I would give the gratitude which he deserved to any one who could confer on me such benefits.” “And how, if he could point out to thee a new way of life and salvation better than any that thy fathers have known? Wouldst thou hearken to his voice and obey his counsels?” “Assuredly I would,” said Edwin. The stranger put his hand upon his head and said: “When next thou shalt receive this sign, remember what thou hast promised and fulfil it.” With that the stranger, whether he were living man or spirit, zealous missionary or martyred apostle, vanished into the darkness. A little cheered by the vision but still melancholy and anxious, Edwin was sitting yet before the palace when lo! his friend the courtier returned to him with joy in his countenance and said: “Arise, dismiss thy cares, go to thy couch and slumber with a quiet mind. The danger is past. The queen, to whom in secret Redwald disclosed his purpose, persuaded him not for any of Ethelfrid’s gold to sell his far more precious kingly honour, or sacrifice the friend who had sought his protection in extremity.” When day dawned it was seen that Edwin’s friend had spoken truly. The king dismissed Ethelfrid’s messengers with a final refusal, and knowing now that he would have to face that king’s anger, resolved to anticipate the blow and to restore the fugitive to his kingdom. Hastily collecting his army he came upon the surprised and imperfectly prepared Ethelfrid on the banks of the Idle, a little river of Nottinghamshire, and there won a decisive victory. It was true that Redwald’s own son, Regenheri, perished in the fight, but Ethelfrid himself was also slain, and the power of Bernicia for a season annihilated. It was a memorable day for the dwellers in the fens by the Humber, and six centuries later the historian, Henry of Huntingdon, still heard the proverb: “As when the Idle river grew foul with Anglian blood.”

This great battle which for the time overthrew the Bernician dynasty and gave the dominion of all Northumbria to Edwin of Deira was fought probably in the year 617. Edwin, who was born in 585, and whose life since he was a child of three years old had been passed in exile, was therefore a man thirty-two years of age when he thus recovered his father’s kingdom. The sons of Ethelfrid fled to the Celts of Scotland, and at least one of them sought the friendly shelter of Iona. Edwin no doubt fixed his capital at York, that great and important city which under its Anglian name of Eoforwac carried on the traditions of Roman Eburacum. The fact that the Roman name subsisted still with so little change in the language of the conquerors makes it probable that there was here no such utter destruction and desolation as at Anderida and Chester, but that there was a continuous civic life from the departure of the last Roman soldier to the enthronement of the first Anglian king. How gladly would we exchange much of the scanty knowledge of the invasion that we do possess for the details of the capture of the Roman capital of the north;[58] but over this conquest, as well as over that of the sister city of Londinium, there hangs a pall of impenetrable darkness. The lines of the Roman city may still be traced with considerable precision; the noble ruin of the multangular tower clearly marks its western corner, but we have not yet recovered, possibly shall never recover, the site of the once stately edifice where the Roman Dux Britanniarum dwelt aforetime, and where in all probability the Anglian kings of Deira held their court. There, however, we may safely imagine Edwin enthroned; from thence his armies marched forth along one or other of the great network of Roman roads which centred at Eburacum. One of his earliest conquests was probably that of the British kingdom of Elmet or Loidis which still lingered on in the dales of the West Riding, but seems to have come to an end about this time. Having consolidated his power over Northumbria, Edwin became the mightiest of all the English kings. The title of Bretwalda was recognised as rightfully belonging to him, and all the other kings of Britain, Anglian, Saxon, Celtic, for a time at least acknowledged him as in a certain sense their superior. Even the islands of Man and Anglesey were added by him to his dominions, the latter island probably deriving from this conquest by the Angles the name which it still bears. Only Jutish Kent still maintained its independence, and with its king Edwin before long formed a close tie of alliance. An unexplained phenomenon in these first ten years of Edwin’s reign, during which, still heathen, he seems to have been pursuing a career of unbroken success, is the disappearance of East Anglia from the scene. It was the might of Redwald the East Anglian which broke the power of Ethelfrid on the great day of the battle at the river Idle, and yet we hear of Edwin, still apparently in the lifetime of his benefactor, establishing his supremacy over all the kings of the Angles and Britons, including therefore among his subject allies even Redwald himself.

It was probably about the year 624 when Edwin was in full middle life, and his sons, by his first Mercian wife, were growing up towards manhood, that he made proposals of marriage to the Kentish princess, Ethelburga. She, like himself, must have been middle-aged. Her father, Ethelbert, had been for some years dead, and her brother, Eadbald, had the disposal of her hand. Mindful of the stripes and the warnings of Laurentius, Eadbald was now loyal in his adherence to Christianity, and replied to Edwin’s messengers “that it was not lawful to give a Christian maiden in marriage to a pagan, lest the faith and sacrament of the heavenly King should be profaned by intercourse with an earthly king who was ignorant of the worship of the true God”. To this objection (a remarkable one as coming from the offspring of the union between the Christian Bertha and the pagan Ethelbert) Edwin replied that he would do nothing contrary to the Christian faith of the princess if she became his bride; that she might bring with her as many ministers of that faith as she pleased, whether male or female, and should have full liberty of worship along with them; and, moreover, he held out hopes that he himself might become a convert to Christianity if on examination by the wise men of his kingdom it should be found more holy and worthier of the Most High than the religion which it offered to supersede. After this reassuring statement, Eadbald’s objections were withdrawn. Ethelburga was sent northwards to meet her bridegroom, and in her train came Paulinus, who was now consecrated on July 21, 625, by Archbishop Justus, bishop of York, which was virtually equivalent to bishop of Northumbria.

Paulinus, who is certainly the noblest figure in the Roman mission to England, was constant in preaching the Christian faith in season and out of season to the men of Northumbria. He met at first with but little success, but a year after his arrival, in April 20, 626, a foully attempted crime brought him in a strange way nearer to his goal. The history of Wessex for some generations after the dethronement of Ceawlin in 592 is obscure and inglorious. Her once powerful kings seem to have accepted without a murmur the supremacy first of Kent and then of East Anglia, and if now they resented the rapidly extended dominion of Northumbria they sought to overthrow it not in fair fight but by the dastardly hand of the conspirator. The kings of the West Saxons at this time were Cynegils and Cwichelm, the latter of whom, perhaps in concert with his colleague, sent an assassin named Eomer, armed with a poisoned dagger, to the court of Edwin. The king was then dwelling in a royal villa near the Yorkshire Derwent (one of the many English rivers bearing that name), and there Eomer presented himself with a pretended message from his master. While Edwin listened intently to his words he drew the deadly weapon from its sheath and made a sudden onslaught upon the king. A faithful thegn named Lilia, who dearly loved his lord, having no shield ready to hand, rushed in between and broke the force of the blow, but not even the sacrifice of his life saved the monarch from a wound; and before Eomer was hewn down by the swords of the surrounding soldiers he had succeeded in stabbing one of them named Fordheri with his fatal weapon. That very night—it was the night of Easter Sunday, 626—Edwin’s queen was delivered of a daughter, to whom was given the name of Eanfled. Touched by the mingled congratulations and exhortations of Paulinus, Edwin gladly consented that his infant daughter, along with eleven members of his household, should receive baptism on the eve of the following Whitsunday. For himself, though he was inclined to listen to the advice of Paulinus, all other matters had to be postponed to the great campaign of vengeance which, as soon as he had recovered from his wound, he undertook against the vile West Saxon murderers. In this campaign he was completely successful. Having slain five kings and much people, and returned victorious from the war, he at once abandoned the worship of idols and began seriously to consider the question of making a formal profession of Christianity.

It was apparently during this religious interregnum that the King and Queen of Northumbria received each a letter from Pope Boniface V. The letters, verbose and unpersuasive in style, can hardly have had much influence on the fresh and vigorous intellect of the Northumbrian king, but no doubt the fact that they should have been written at all by the father of western Christendom was felt as a compliment to Edwin’s greatness. Still, however, the king hesitated before making a final breach with the traditions of his fathers and accepting Christ instead of his ancestral Woden. Unable to dismiss the subject from his thoughts he sat much apart in solitary places and there mused upon the parting of the ways. While he thus sat one day, Paulinus came unbidden into his presence, laid his hand upon his head and said: “Rememberest thou this sign?” With that the scene outside the East Anglian palace came back vividly into Edwin’s memory. He was about to fall at the feet of Paulinus, but the bishop lifting him up said in a gentle voice: “Behold thou hast escaped by the Divine favour the snares of thine enemies: thou hast received the kingdom which was promised thee: delay not to stretch out thy hand and grasp the third blessing, even eternal life”.[59]

Thus admonished Edwin determined to delay no longer his profession of Christianity, but wisely resolved to associate as many as possible of his counsellors with him, and to make the great change the act of the nation rather than of the king alone. Then followed the memorable and well-known scene in the Witenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, perhaps at York, perhaps at the royal villa by the Derwent. When the subject of the proposed change of faith was mooted in the assembly of the elders, its first and most strenuous advocate was found to be the chief priest Coifi, who complained that his past years spent in zealous service of the gods had brought him no proportionate share of the royal favour. To this sordid calculator of the worldly advantages to be derived from this or that form of faith, succeeded an unnamed ealdorman who, in words as well fitted to the twentieth century as to the seventh, painted the short, perplexing and precarious life of man “like a sparrow flitting through your hall, O king! when we are seated round the fire at supper-time, while the winds are howling and the snow is drifting without. It passes swiftly in at one door and out at another, feeling for the moment the warmth and shelter of your palace, but it flies from winter to winter and swiftly escapes from our sight. Even such is our life here, and if any one can tell us certainly what lies beyond it, we shall do wisely to follow his teaching.” Moved by these and similar arguments the elders and counsellors of the king, unanimously as it would seem, voted for the proposed religious revolution.

After Paulinus had expounded to the assembly the doctrines of Christianity, Coifi exclaimed: “Long ago had I suspected that the things which we were worshipping were naught, for the more earnestly I sought for truth in that worship the less did I find it. Now I openly profess that in this new preaching alone is the way of eternal life to be found. O king! let us at once give over to the flames the temples and altars which we have consecrated so vainly.” The king gladly consented, but asked who should deal the death-blow. “I,” said Coifi. “Who more fitting than I to destroy, in the new wisdom which is given me, the idols which I worshipped in my folly?” He besought the king to give him arms and a war-horse, and though the multitude, who knew that it was forbidden to one of their priests to bear arms or to ride on anything but a mare, deemed him to be insane, he mounted the charger, rode to a great temple in the neighbourhood, hurled his lance into its sacred precincts and called upon his companions to give to the flames the shrine itself and all the enclosures by which it was surrounded from the gaze of the multitude. A hundred years afterwards men still showed at Goodmanham on the Derwent, east of York, the ruins of this great iconoclasm.

The overthrow of the old faith was followed by the visible triumph of the new. On Easter eve, 627, just a year after his escape from the dagger of the man of Wessex, Edwin was baptised by Paulinus in the new wooden church of St. Peter at York, a church which he was shortly to replace by a more elaborate edifice in stone. His sons by the Mercian princess before long followed his example: his young children, the offspring of Ethelburga, and even a little grandson Yffi, son of Osfrid, together with a great number of the nobles of the court, were all solemnly received into the Christian Church. The preaching of Paulinus, so long resultless, now seemed to be bearing abundant fruit. Up in remote Bernicia, where the royal villa of Yeavering nestled under a hill, an outlying sentinel of the Cheviots which still bears the name of Yeavering Bell, Paulinus was engaged for twenty-six consecutive days catechising and baptising in the river Glen the multitudes who flocked to him. Returning to Deira, to the Roman station of Cataractonium, he there baptised many converts in the river Swale, no church or oratory having yet been erected for Christian worship. In his zeal he overpassed the strict limits of Northumbria: he crossed the Humber, preached the Gospel in Lindsey, converted the “prefect” of the city of Lincoln, and baptised a multitude of people at noon-day in the river Trent, King Edwin himself honouring the ceremony by his presence. One of the many converts who went down on that day into the river with Paulinus described the scene to a youth who when an abbot, in his reverend old age, passed the tradition on to Bede, telling him that the great missionary was a man of tall stature, slightly stooping, with black hair, thin face, aquiline but slender nose, in his general aspect at once venerable and awe-inspiring. His constant attendant was a certain deacon James, a courageous and energetic man, who also lived to be a contemporary of the historian.

In after years of turbulence and discord men looked back on the reign of Edwin as a sort of golden age. They said that then a woman with her new-born babe might cross Britain from sea to sea unharmed by any man. In many a place where he saw a clear fountain bubbling up beside the public way he would order stakes to be erected, upon which brazen pots were hung, and none dared to touch them save the thirsty travellers for whose use they were designed. His state was indeed kingly. Not only in war was his standard displayed; but in peace also, as he was journeying from villa to villa and from province to province, attended by a long and brilliant train of servants, a banner with a tuft of feathers, called by the Romans tufa and by the English thuuf and hinting perhaps at something like imperial dignity, was borne before the mighty king of Northumbria.

But this splendour of regal power was early overshadowed. It was not, after all, from Eburacum that the word of power was to go forth which was to bind the various Teutonic races of England into one nation. The Anglian power was not thoroughly established over Wales, and already the destined rival of Northumbria, the Mercian kingdom, was rising into baleful pre-eminence. Singularly enough, it was from these two powers which are said to have sheltered Edwin in the time of his evil fortunes that his ruin came. Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, descended from that Maelgwn whom Gildas vituperated under the name of “The Great Dragon of the Island,” was son of Cadvan, at whose court, it is said, Edwin had passed his boyhood. Doubtless Cadwallon keenly resented the position of inferiority to which his nation had been reduced by Ethelfrid’s great victory of Chester, which shut them off from Strathclyde, as Ceawlin’s victory of Deorham had shut them off from Devon and Cornwall. When Edwin, once Cadvan’s humble guest, had become the mightiest prince in Britain, Cadwallon, unwilling to accept his yoke, had taken refuge—so say the Welsh annals—in Ireland. He had now returned and was determined to strike one more blow for independence and for liberty of passage to Strathclyde. With this intent he formed an alliance with the ruler of Mercia, Penda, who became king in 626, a year before Edwin’s baptism; who was still pagan; and who in his dull ferocity was as typical a specimen of the old faith as Edwin of the new. The alliance of the Welsh Christian and the English pagan for the overthrow of the newly born Christianity of Northumbria was scarcely felt to be unnatural, so intense was the bitterness engendered by the Paschal controversy and the varying fashions of ecclesiastical tonsure.

The armies met at Heathfield, which is identified with Hatfield Chase on the north-east of Doncaster, on October 12, 633. We have no details of the encounter: we only know that Edwin was defeated, that he and his eldest son Osfrid were slain, and that Cadwallon and his ally roamed in savage wrath over the plains of Yorkshire and Northumberland. The Christian, even more ferocious than the pagan, spared neither sex nor age, recognised no claim to mercy drawn from the profession of one common faith, and vowed (this surely when out of hearing of his ally) that he would root out the whole brood of Angles from the land of Britain.[60]

Edwin’s second son fled for refuge to the court of the Mercian king, and was afterwards slain by him, in violation of his sworn promise of protection. The widowed Ethelburga fled to the court of her brother, the King of Kent, under the escort of Paulinus. The royal infants—such was the terror of the times—were separated from their mother, and it was left for a brave soldier named Bass, one of Edwin’s thegns, to bring to the Kentish court the girl Eanfled, her brother Wuscfrea, and their little nephew Yffi, the orphaned son of Osfrid. The widowed queen afterwards sent the boys to the court of her cousin, Frankish Dagobert, that they might be safe from the new rulers of Bernicia, but both died in infancy in that foreign land. As for Paulinus he seems to have bowed his head to the storm of the recrudescent paganism of Northumbria. He vacated his Yorkish see, and was appointed Bishop of Rochester, in succession to Romanus, who had been drowned in the Mediterranean when sent on a mission to Rome. He died in 644. The ill-starred union of Mercian paganism and British fanaticism seemed to have accomplished its purpose. Northumberland was a wilderness and Northumbrian Christianity a vanished dream.

CHAPTER IX.
OSWALD OF BERNICIA.

When the cause of Christianity and, as connected with it, the hope of eventually building in the new England a civilised and well-ordered state seemed at its darkest, light arose from an island in the Hebrides; it spread to a rough storm-beaten rock on the Northumbrian coast; it illumined one of the noblest and loveliest pages in the history of our nation, the reign of Oswald of Bernicia.

The conversion of the southern Picts to Christianity is believed to have taken place more than two centuries before the date that we have now reached. Near the close of the fourth century when the Roman empire had already begun to crumble into ruin, St. Ninian, a Briton educated at Rome, filled with veneration for the soldier-saint, Martin of Tours, came to the region between the Roman Wall and the Grampians, preached Christianity with much success to the Picts who dwelt in that country, and built a monastic church dedicated to St. Martin, on one of the promontories of Galloway which project south into the Irish sea. This church, built of stone, and thereby differing from the humbler wooden churches of the period, was called Candida Casa (a name represented in its modern successor Whithern), and it is said to have been still in course of erection when Ninian heard of the death of the holy man in whose name he dedicated his beautiful “white house”. Nearly two centuries passed away. There was much intercourse of various kinds between the dwellers in the Hebrides and their neighbours the Scots of Ireland. The Dalriadic kingdom, Scottish (that is Erse) by race and Christian by religious profession, was set up in Argyll and the adjacent islands; but the Picts north of the Grampians whose relations to Dalriada were generally hostile, remained obstinately heathen. All this was changed by an event which took place about the year 563—the arrival of St. Columba from Ireland. Whatever accretions of superstitious legend may have grown up around the name of this saint, the historic importance of the great apostle of the Picts cannot be denied, and can hardly be over-stated.

Born in Donegal, in the year 521, a scion of the princely clan of the Hy Neill, descended from Irish kings both on his father’s and his mother’s side, the young Irishman in his boyish days showed such zeal in his attendance at church that his baptismal name of Colum was changed to Colum-cille or Columba of the church. He was ordained priest, but the bent of his religious temper like that of most of his Irish contemporaries was all towards the monastic profession. During his early middle life he was busily engaged in founding monasteries, the first in point of date being that of Derry, and the most famous that of Durrow in the diocese of Meath. But in his fortieth year, 561, he became entangled in one of the ever-recurring civil wars of his distressful country. A great battle was fought at Cuildremhne, in Connaught, near the boundary between that province and Ulster. Columba’s kinsfolk, the northern Hy Neill, prevailed and the King of Ireland, commanding the clans of the southern Hy Neill, was defeated. Though his friends’ cause triumphed, the battle appears in some unexplained manner to have injured Columba’s religious position in his native country. He seems to have been excommunicated by some of his brethren, possibly on account of his alleged responsibility for the strife. At any rate he now resolved to quit his country and, perhaps as a penance for his sins, to take up his abode in some place from which he could not even see the shores of his beloved Ireland. Such a place, after some wandering, he found in the then little known island of Hy, famous to after ages under the name of Iona; where, as tradition tells, he ascended a hill which still bears the name of Cul-ri-Erin (back turned to Erin), and when he found that no line of the Irish coast, however dimly seen, could thence be discerned on the horizon, amid all the cluster of surrounding islands, he determined to make that little spot his dwelling-place. Iona is separated from the much larger island of Mull by a channel about one mile broad. It is only three miles long, and from a mile to a mile and a half in breadth; yet in this little space there is considerable variety of scenery; hills, the highest of which attains to an elevation of 320 feet, “retired dells, long reaches of sand on shores indented with quiet bays, little coves between bare and striking rocks, and on the west wild barren cliffs and high rocky islets opposed to the sweep of the Atlantic”.[61] As Bede says: “it is not large but computed as containing five families according to English reckoning”. (The word “families” is rendered “hides” in the English Chronicle, and this is an important passage as showing what were the average dimensions of a “hide of land” in early Saxon times.) The ruins now visible on the island are those of a Benedictine abbey of the thirteenth century. No traces remain of the buildings, probably wooden, raised by St. Columba, but there are many interesting natural features which may be recognised in the nearly contemporary life of the saint written by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adamnan.

The objects which Columba set before himself after his migration to Iona were political as well as religious. His kinsmen, the Scots of Dalriada, were harassed and oppressed by the pagan Picts in the east of the island, whose king, Brude, had in the year 560 inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scottish king, Gabhran. Columba would fain convert the Pictish conqueror to Christianity, and at the same time obtain more generous treatment for his beaten countrymen; and by the magic of his personality he achieved a striking success in both directions. King Brude in 565 embraced Christianity, and relations of peace and friendship were established between him and the man whom, in 574, Columba succeeded in placing on the throne of Dalriada, Aidan, Prince of Strathclyde. The thirty-four years of Columba’s life, after his great migration, were spent in establishing monasteries in the land of the northern Picts, in the Hebrides and in his native Ireland, to which he paid several visits, and where the once excommunicated partisan was now an honoured, almost worshipped guest. These Columban monasteries, “the family of Iona” as they were called, were of a distinctly different type from that of the monasteries of the Benedictine rule. Like all the Irish monastic establishments they partook largely of the tribal character. The tribe gave the land, contributed to the support of the monks, had a right to receive, apparently without special charge, their religious ministrations, and in certain circumstances had also a right to nominate one of its members as abbot, though the first claim upon this coveted office resided in the family of the founder. It was thus that the first nine abbots of Iona were all descended from the same family, the northern Hy Neill, from which St. Columba himself had sprung. This tribal character of the monasteries suited the genius of the Celtic populations, and was one reason of the success of the missionaries in converting them to Christianity. It has been truly said[62] that “these large monasteries, as in their external aspect they appeared to be, were in reality Christian colonies into which converts, after being tonsured, were brought under the name of monks”.

The large part thus played by the monasteries in the work of conversion impressed in its turn a peculiar character on the churches of Ireland and Hebridean Scotland, rendering them more exclusively monastic and less purely episcopal than the churches of Italy and Gaul. This divergence resulted in part from the nature of things, and was due to the differences of place and time in which the conversion of the several countries was respectively effected. The Bishops of Lyons and Vienne, of Toledo and Seville began their work while the Roman Empire was still standing, were to some extent moulded by its form, shared the prosperity and the influence of its great towns and were essentially magnates of cities. Columba, his comrades and his pupils, came into a much ruder and more primitive state of society. The rough tribal rulers whom they converted had scarcely any cities worthy of the name. The new missionaries planted their monasteries in such rural places as promised them the supply of their simple wants, or even only safety from the attacks of a midnight foe—often on an island in a lake or surrounded by the ocean—and there, not so much by eloquent preaching as by mere rightness and simplicity of living, succeeded in converting whole populations to the religion of Christ. The conversions thus obtained seem to have been for the most part more genuine and more durable than those which were first effected in the large cities of the old Roman world and from thence radiated outwards into the country.

It has seemed necessary to emphasise this distinction between the two types of ecclesiastical organisation (the fourth century Gaulish and the sixth century Irish Churches) because the difference reappears in our own history. The Roman mission under Augustine and his successors, and especially under Paulinus in Northumbria, seems to have gone on the old urban and episcopal lines, while the far more successful mission from Iona, with which we have now to deal, was monastic, many-centred and rural. In the year 597, the very year of Augustine’s arrival in England, St. Columba died. He is one of the most vividly seen personalities of the early Middle Ages: a man of somewhat hot temper in youth, softened and controlled in later life, with a stately beauty of feature which seemed to correspond with his princely descent, and with a kind of magnetic power of attracting to himself the devotion of his followers, a lover of animals and beloved by them. One of his natural gifts was an extraordinarily strong and resonant voice which, when he sang the psalms of the church, could be heard distinctly for more than a mile. A great open-air preacher, an organiser and a poet—he eagerly championed the cause of his brother bards before an Irish synod—he might, perhaps, not unfittingly, be called the John Wesley of the sixth century.

In 615, about eighteen years after the death of Columba, when his fellow-tribesman Fergna was ruling, fourth in the series of abbots, at Iona, a party of refugees from the south crossed the little channel and landed on the shore of the island, craving shelter and sanctuary. They were some of the attendants of Ethelfrid, the late King of Bernicia, who had been slain “when the river Idle ran foul with Anglian blood,” and they brought, besides other noble youths, Oswald, that king’s second son, and implored the brethren to protect him from the avenging might of Edwin. There was no shadow of a claim for this young Anglian, son of an obstinate pagan, on the hospitality of the Irish monks, but the request was willingly granted. Oswald and the young nobles his companions were kindly received, were soon baptised, and instructed in the doctrines of Christianity, and growing up to manhood on the sequestered Hebridean isle, probably looked forward to no other sort of life than that which was led by the simple-hearted monks their entertainers.

All this was changed, in 633, by the great and unlooked-for catastrophe of Heathfield. The two Northumbrian kingdoms, united under the strong rule of Ethelfrid and Edwin, fell once more apart. Osric, cousin of Edwin, son of his uncle Elfric, ruled in Deira, and Eanfrid, eldest son of Ethelfrid, in Bernicia. These two young princes, each of whom had made profession of the Christian faith, both apostatised and returned to paganism. Possibly the sordid calculations by which Coifi had justified his renunciation of the faith of his fathers weighed with them now in the opposite scale, and they felt themselves justified in deserting the Christians’ God, who had abandoned their land to the tender mercies of Penda and Cadwallon. But the triumph of paganism was short. Osric, who with inadequate forces besieged Cadwallon while holding the “municipium” of York, was killed and his whole army cut to pieces by a sudden sally of the Welsh king. This happened in the summer of the year which followed the battle of Heathfield, and, apparently in the following autumn, Bernician Eanfrid, coming with twelve chosen warriors to treat of peace with Cadwallon, was treacherously slain by his orders. So full of gloomy memories was this year, 634, that the monkish chroniclers, who afterwards drew up a scheme of Anglian chronology, decided that it should not come into the number of the years, and silently included it in the glorious reign of him who succeeded the apostates.

This successor was Oswald, who came from Iona evidently determined to play the part of a Christian hero-king, and who endured to his life’s end steadfast in that decision. By one bold stroke he delivered his nation, Bernicia, from the Cambrian ravagers. “When he arrived after the death of his brother Eanfrid with a small army, and fortified by the faith of Christ, the wicked general of the Britons with the immense forces which, as he boasted, nothing could resist, was slain by him at the place which is called in the English tongue Denisesburn,’ that is, the stream of Denis.” So runs the first simple statement of Bede as to this important encounter which for ever settled the question whether the Celt or the Teuton was to be supreme in Northern Britain. From Bede himself, as a kind of afterthought, and from Adamnan, the biographer of St. Columba, we get some additional particulars which enable us to see more clearly if not the strategic features of the battle at least what was passing in the minds of the combatants. It seems that the battle itself was fought not at “Denisesburn” but at Heavenfield, a little on the north of the Roman wall, which probably was an important element in the problem that the Anglian king, with his great inferiority of forces, had to solve.[63] The great Roman work, striding across the country in its uncompromising way, here traverses a high moorland which separates the main stream of the Tyne from its northern affluent, and in this portion of its career it is from 700 to 800 feet above the level of the sea. Though none of its stones are here remaining, we can yet trace the high mounds and deep fosses of its companion, the line of fortification on the south, which is known by the name of the vallum. Between these two lines, that of stone and that of earth, ran the Roman road, still probably in Edwin’s day capable of being traversed, notwithstanding 230 years of neglect. Along this road Cadwallon may have marched, and by it he may have encamped for the night, while somewhere, behind either wall or vallum, Oswald may have placed in ambush his father’s veterans. He himself was in a mood of religious and patriotic exaltation. On the day before the battle he had in his sleep a vision of the blessed Columba, whom he had never seen with the eyes of the flesh. The saint’s beautiful face shone with angelic brightness: his figure rose majestic till it seemed to touch the clouds: he spread his mantle over the Anglian camp. Addressing Oswald in the words which Moses spake to Joshua he told him to be strong and of a good courage, for the Lord would be with him. Let him march out on the following night to battle: his foes should be all scattered in flight, and the Welsh king should be delivered into his hands.

Awaking, Oswald assembled his council, told them his dream and received the unanimous promise of the army that if they won the victory they would make profession of the Christian faith. He then caused a large wooden cross to be prepared and a hole to be dug, in which it was firmly planted, he himself holding it erect with both hands while his soldiers filled in the soil. When this was done he cried to the host with a loud voice: “Let us all bend our knees and together call upon God Almighty, the Living and the True, that He in His pity will defend us from our proud and cruel foe: for He knoweth that this is a just war that we have undertaken for the deliverance of our people”. All obeyed his command and prayed to the God of the Christians. That night, just before dawn, they moved out of camp, attacked the probably unsuspecting Britons, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. Many of the enemy must have perished on the wide moorland; some who probably fled southwards with Cadwallon, their king, were whelmed in the deep waters of the Tyne. Cadwallon himself met his death (how we know not) on the banks of the little Rowley Burn, some five miles south of the Tyne and ten miles from the field of battle. Such was the event which ruined the British hopes of a reconquest of the island, which confirmed the endangered work of Ethelfrid, ratified the victory of Chester, cut off the Britons of the south from their kinsmen in Strathclyde, and confined the former to that mountainous rectangle of territory which we know as Wales. The son of the slain king, “Cadwallader the Blessed,” perhaps strove for a time to maintain the high, almost imperial pretensions of his father, but his long reign seems to have been on the whole disastrous, and when he died a pilgrim at Rome in the year 681, the Welsh chronicler himself admits that “thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it”.[64] The two centuries which followed the battle of Heavenfield are the darkest and dreariest in the history of Wales.

Returning in triumph, as Columba in vision had promised him, Oswald proceeded to his father’s wooden palace at Bamburgh, and from thence, apparently with little difficulty, extended his rule over all Northumbria. In Bernicia he would, of course, as the son of Ethelfrid, find many loyal hearts ready to greet him; and even Deira, now that Edwin and his progeny were off the stage, had possibly a welcome for the man who was not only the deliverer from British oppression, but also on his mother’s side descended from the old line. For it will be remembered that Acha, wife of Ethelfrid, was daughter of Aelle of Deira.

Thus, then, did Bamburgh, which is now a lonely village by the German Ocean, become “the royal city,” the most strongly fortified abode of the most powerful king in Britain,[65] the centre of a realm which stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, and apparently, through the rest of the seventh century, the destined capital of England, if England should ever attain to unity. The traveller who now visits this dethroned queen of Northumbria will see much that, however noble and picturesque, must be eliminated by an effort of the imagination if he would picture to himself the Bamburgh of King Oswald. The massive keep that “stands four-square to every wind that blows,” dates from the reign of Henry II.; the great hall of the castle now ingeniously restored by a modern architect, was originally of the time of Edward I.; some of the still existing buildings were reared by a benevolent ecclesiastic in the reign of George III.; but the natural features of the place are unchangeable and unchanged, and in looking upon them we know that we behold the same scenes that met the eye of the conqueror of Cadwallon. Such is the rock itself, an upheaved mass of basalt upon whose black sides the tooth of time seems to gnaw in vain; such are the long sandy dunes which gather round its base; such the Inner and Outer Farne Islands, fragments of basalt rising out of the ocean at distances ranging from three to six miles from the castle; such the far-off peninsula, which when the tide flows, becomes Holy Island; such the long range of Cheviot on the western horizon, snow-covered for many months of the year. Such, we might almost say, is the fierce wind which, from one quarter or another, seems for ever attacking the lonely fortress, and which assuredly battered the “timbered” palace of Oswald as it now batters the time-worn fortress of the Plantagenet.

Scarcely had Oswald seated himself on the Northumbrian throne when he began to labour for the conversion of his new subjects to Christianity, a Christianity, however, not altogether after the fashion which Paulinus had taught to Edwin of Deira, but rather according to that which he himself had learned of his friends, the monks of Iona. The abbot Seghine paid him a visit, probably soon after his accession, and heard from his own lips the marvellous story of his vision of Columba and the victory of Heavenfield; and one of his monastic family was despatched to teach the Northumbrians the religion of Christ. This missionary was a man of narrow intellect and austere temper, who soon returned to Iona with the unwelcome tidings that it was but lost labour to try to teach a nation so barbarous and untamable. At the council whereat this report was rendered sat a man, probably in early middle life, the monk Aidan. “It seems to me, my brother,” said he, “that thou hast been somewhat too hard on these poor unlearned folk, and hast scarcely remembered the apostolic precept to give milk to babes till such time as they may be able to understand and to keep the more sublime commands of God.” The eyes of all in the council were turned upon the speaker who had so opportunely spoken words of wisdom. “Aidan shall be bishop,” “Aidan shall be ordained to preach to the Northumbrians,” was the unanimous decision of the assembly. He accordingly went southward, and for the next sixteen years (635–51) was the great missionary bishop of Northumbria.

It must have seemed to Aidan when he visited the palace of the king, his patron, as if it was a special act of Providence that had fixed that palace where he found it. For here on the storm-beaten Northumbrian coast, within six miles from the royal dwelling, lay an island whereupon he could establish his monastery, and wherein he could be out of the world yet within reach of the world like his prototype Columba in Iona. This island which was given him by the king for his possession, bore then and has borne intermittently ever since the name of Lindisfarne; but even at this day for once that its legal designation of Lindisfarne is mentioned, you shall hear it a thousand times called by the endearing appellation of Holy Island, given to it probably twelve centuries ago when it first received the imprint of Aidan’s sandals. The island is but a small one, only about 1,000 acres in extent, with three fair-sized farms, and a population of about 800 persons, chiefly engaged in fishing, and in winter often hard pressed for subsistence. The beautiful ruins of the Benedictine abbey, the parish church, the castle, built in the Commonwealth period, all belong to ages long posterior to the time when it first became “Holy Island”; but here, as at Bamburgh, the natural features of the landscape are so unchanged that it requires but little effort of the imagination to enable the beholder to travel backward through the centuries to see Cuthbert praying among the sea-gulls, or Aidan slowly pacing the long spit of sand which lay between him and the palace of the king. It will be seen that it is spoken of as an island, and such for all practical purposes it has ever been; for though on the north it stretches out a long sandy arm to the mainland, and at dead low water travellers may reach it from thence all-but dry shod, still their path, traversing three miles of wet sand and leading them through the waste of waters on either hand, seems to sever them from the mainland rather than to unite them thereto, and the inhabitants are at this day islanders in heart and feeling.

Here then dwelt the Celtic apostle of Northumbria, and from hence did he diffuse that influence which accomplished the lasting conversion of the northern Angles to Christianity. In this work he was powerfully aided by King Oswald. In all the history of Christian Church and state during eighteen centuries there are few fairer chapters than that which deals with the intercourse between Oswald and Aidan. There was evidently something in the character of the Celtic bishop which won for him more than the veneration, the love, of the Anglian king. Aidan was a man of absolute simplicity of character, intent on one purpose alone, that of spreading the Christian faith in the kingdom of Northumbria, utterly indifferent to wealth, and fame, and power, and yet without that harshness and austerity which the men of one idea so often display, and which made many of the noblest of medieval saints unloveable. Herein, and in his genuine, not feigned, contempt of riches we trace a certain resemblance between the saint of Lindisfarne and the saint of Assisi. Bede describes the character of Aidan with an enthusiasm all the more trustworthy, because he regretfully observes that “his zeal for God was not according to knowledge, since he kept the day of the Lord’s Pascha according to the manner of his race, that is from the fourteenth day to the twentieth”. He says of him, however, that “herein did he chiefly commend his doctrine to others in that he taught none otherwise than as he lived among his friends”; words which remind us of Chaucer’s often quoted description of the “Poure Persoun of a Toun”:—

But Criste’s loore and his Apostles twelve

He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.

It was a strange, but, as Bede says, a most beautiful sight, when the missionary who as yet had not fully mastered our English tongue would preach to the people; when Oswald, whose boyhood passed at Iona had made him master of the difficult Gaelic tongue, stood forth as interpreter, and translated to his own grim warriors and to the servants of his palace “the words of the heavenly life” as they fell from the lips of Aidan. Occasionally, but not too often, for he dreaded the fascinations of a court, Aidan would accept the royal invitation and appear with one or two of his clergy in the great hall at Bamburgh. Even then after a short and hurried repast he would go forth speedily with his friends to read the Scriptures, to chant the Psalter, or to pray. But the scene enacted at one such courtly festival lingered for generations in the memory of men. It was Easter day (the heterodox Easter, as it may be feared), and the king and the bishop had just sat down to the mid-day meal. The bishop was on the point of stretching forth his hand to bless the royal dainties which were served in a splendid silver dish, when the king’s almoner abruptly entered and told his master that a multitude of poor persons gathered from all quarters had arrived, and were sitting in the streets and in the courtyard of the palace, plaintively demanding alms from the king. Thereupon Oswald at once ordered the victuals to be distributed among the beggars, and the dish itself to be broken up into fragments, one of which should be given to each of them. Aidan, who was himself a most generous benefactor of the poor, was so delighted with the deed that he clasped the king’s right hand and exclaimed, “May this hand never see corruption!”

Devoted as Oswald was to the Christianisation of his people he was no pious roi fainéant, but a strong and successful monarch who made his power felt at least from the Firth of Forth to the Bristol Channel. Bede tells us, perhaps with some unconscious exaggeration of the glory of his native Northumbria, that “he received under his sway all the nations and provinces of Britain, which are divided into four languages, those of the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Angles”. As he evidently here uses “Angles” as equivalent to Angles and Saxons, this sentence represents Oswald as accomplishing more than Egbert was to achieve two centuries later, and as practically the lord of our whole island. Consistently herewith he represents him as the sixth of the Bretwaldas; and Adamnan, who at first calls him merely “regnator Saxonicus,” says that after the victory of Heavenfield he was “ordained by God emperor of the whole of Britain”. But all these statements must be taken with considerable reservation. Oswald wielded evidently during the seven years of his reign the predominant power in the island, but we are not to think of him as interfering with any of the details of administration in Wessex or East Anglia, still less in Wales or among the Scots of Dalriada. With Wessex, indeed, we are expressly told that he formed ties both of relationship and of religion. When Cynegils, King of the West Saxons, who had been converted to Christianity by the preaching of Birinus, was baptised, his godfather, the man who, according to ecclesiastical phrase, “received him emerging from the sacred laver,” was Oswald of Bernicia, who also became his son-in-law, accepting from the old West Saxon king the hand of his daughter in marriage.

From the character of our one chief authority, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, it naturally but unfortunately follows that we are left in almost total ignorance of the political events in Oswald’s reign. Gladly would we know, for instance, whether the fierce Mercian, Penda, bowed his head even for a time under the yoke of Northumbrian supremacy, but on this point we are left without information. There are hints of earlier wars and fightings between the two states, but all that we can certainly say is that on August 5, 642, Oswald and Penda met in battle at a place called Maserfield,[66] and that though Penda’s brother fell in the fight the Mercian king “was victorious by diabolic art,” and Oswald lay dead on the battlefield. He died praying: when he saw himself girt round by the Mercian host and knew that his death was inevitable, he cried aloud: “Lord, have mercy on the souls of my army,” and the remembrance of this prayer passed into a proverb: “‘Lord, pity their souls,’ as Oswald said when he was falling to the ground”.

Oswald was in his thirty-eighth year when he died, the second Northumbrian prince in the prime and vigour of his days, who had fallen before the elderly barbarian, Penda. The brutal heathen had his head and hands severed from the body and fixed on stakes; but before long, at a turn of the wheel of fortune, these relics, now deemed to be endowed with miraculous power, were carried to distant sites where they met with more honourable treatment. The head was deposited in the monastery at Holy Island, and in after years shared the migrations of the relics of St. Cuthbert: the hand, “the uncorrupted hand” which Aidan had blessed, was enshrined at Bamburgh: the body, by the order of Oswald’s niece, Osthryd, now Queen of the Mercians, was reverently laid in the monastery of Bardney in the centre of Lincolnshire. In his lifetime Oswald had, with some display of force, extended his dominion over this South-Humbrian land, mindful of which fact the patriotic monks were loth to receive the body of their conqueror, but a pillar of fire hovering at night over the coffin showed them that the corpse to which they were refusing admittance would be a precious and wonder-working relic, and turned their aversion into eagerness for its possession. Numerous in fact were the miracles alleged to be wrought by the dissevered fragments of the kingly body, and even by the dust of the battlefield on which he had fallen. The day of his martyrdom, August 5, was appropriated to the cult of Saint Oswald, and the fame of the new saint and his wonder-working relics spread rapidly not only in England but in Ireland and on the Continent.

CHAPTER X.
OSWY AND PENDA.

The Mercian victory of the Maserfield was doubtless followed by a ravaging expedition into Northumbria. When the waters of the flood subside we find that country again split into the two kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. In the former reigned Oswy (or Oswiu), brother of the martyred Oswald; in the latter, Oswin, son of that Osric, Edwin’s cousin, whose one year’s reign preceded the accession of Oswald. For seven years (644–651) these two kings reigned side by side in the northern land, but before their further career is described it is necessary to turn back and consider more closely the history of that midland kingdom which was running so even a race with Northumbria for the supremacy in Britain.

The causes and the stages of the development of the Mercian power, and even the origin of the Mercian state, are alike hidden from us. All that can be said is that in the early part of the seventh century we find the Mercians, an Anglian tribe, manifesting themselves in force in Staffordshire and Shropshire along the Welsh March from which they perhaps derived their name. As the century proceeds, they conquer or ally with themselves the Middle Anglians, who seem to have inhabited Leicestershire and some of the country adjacent thereto; as well as the South Angles in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire, who sooner or later became incorporated in the new state. The agent in these great changes was probably Penda himself, the strong-willed pagan who, in 626, at the age of fifty, ascended the Mercian throne, which he occupied for nearly thirty years. Of his alliance with Cadwallon of Wales, and his successful wars with the Northumbrian kings, Edwin and Oswald, enough has already been said in previous chapters; but his dealings with Wessex and East Anglia require some further notice.

In the year 628, as we learn from the Chronicle, Cynegils and Cwichelm fought with Penda at Cirencester and made a treaty there. These are the two Kings of Wessex, apparently reigning together as father and son, who sent the assassin to deal that murderous blow at the life of Edwin which was foiled only by the self-devotion of the loyal thegn, Lilla. That event and the retaliatory campaign of Edwin against Wessex no doubt preceded by some years this war of 628 between Wessex and Mercia. Of the details of the treaty by which the war was ended we know nothing, but it has been conjectured with some probability[67] that it included a cession of the north-western conquests of Ceawlin to Mercia, and the acceptance by Wessex of the line of the Thames as her northern boundary.[68]

Penda’s next intervention in the affairs of his southern neighbours took place in 645, three years after his overthrow of Oswald. Wessex had in the meantime become Christian, chiefly through the preaching of a certain Birinus, who had received his commission from Pope Honorius on his assurance “that he would scatter the seeds of the holy faith in the innermost parts of England whither no teacher had preceded him”. The orthodoxy of Pope Honorius has been sorely attacked on account of his unfortunate vacillations on the subject of the Monothelete heresy, but his evident interest in the conversion of our remote island should be allowed to plead on his behalf as at least one who was zealous for the Christian faith. Birinus discharged the commission entrusted to him with energy and success. We have but little authentic information as to his life, but it seems clear that in respect of the conversion of the kingdoms he held the same relation towards Wessex that Augustine had held to Kent, Paulinus to Deira, and Aidan to Bernicia. The influence of Northumbrian Christianity aided the zealous missionary, and, as we have seen, Oswald of Bernicia stood sponsor for his future father-in-law when in the year 635 Cynegils, the aged King of Wessex, received the sign of baptism. Cwichelm, son of Cynegils and partner of his throne, the chief actor apparently in the murderous attempt upon Edwin of Deira, followed his father’s example in the following year, but died soon after, and when old Cynegils died (641) five years later, he was succeeded by another son, named Cenwalh, who still persisted in heathenism. Soon, however, as Bede remarks, he who refused the offer of the heavenly kingdom, lost his earthly crown. Growing tired of his wife, who was a daughter of Penda, he divorced her, and this repudiation naturally brought upon him the wrath of the Mercian king. Expelled from his kingdom (645) by the victorious arms of Penda, Cenwalh took refuge in East Anglia, at that time the most enthusiastically Christian of all the English kingdoms, with the possible exception of Kent. The persuasions of the East Anglian king, Anna, induced him to make profession of Christianity, and when, after three years’ exile (648), he succeeded in recovering his ancestral kingdom, Cenwalh continued faithful to his new creed, and for the remaining twenty-eight years of his reign he ruled as a Christian king. Thus Wessex, before the seventh century was half way through, accepted the faith of Christ.

The place which witnessed the baptisms of these West Saxon kings, and in which Birinus fixed his episcopal seat, deserves a passing notice. The Dorchester of Oxfordshire (which must on no account be confounded with the county-town of Dorset) is now a pleasant but obscure village on the left bank of the Thames about twelve miles south-east of Oxford. It is in a country full of archæological interest. High on a hill to the west rises what has been truly called “the mighty camp of Sinodun,” a relic apparently of pre-Roman times; and nearer may be traced the so-called “dykes” of the Thames, the work probably of Roman engineers. In the village itself is a fine old abbey church with architecture of various ages, a church which might yet serve on occasion as a cathedral. There is also a great charm in the antique appearance of the place with its picturesque houses, some of them dating from the seventeenth century. Brought thus in contact with the spirit of the past, and freed from the importunate clamours of the industrial present, the traveller finds it not hard to re-create the scenes of the yet more distant past, to imagine Birinus preaching in his little wooden church, or Cynegils and his thegns riding through the swollen river. But for all this, it is hard to bring home to oneself the truth that this village was an ecclesiastical, and almost a literary centre, while Oxford, if it existed at all, was an obscure cluster of cottages; that she was the ecclesiastical metropolis, first of Wessex and then of Mercia, and that royal Winchester and stately Lincoln are both in a certain sense the daughters of Dorchester.

The shelter which King Anna gave to the fugitive Cenwalh was an act of generous courage in the ruler of a country which had already suffered much and was to suffer more at the hands of the terrible Penda. It will be remembered that Redwald, King of East Anglia, who had shown hospitality to Edwin, died a heathen, though more than tolerant of Christianity; but his successor, Earpwald (617–28), yielding to the persuasions of the Northumbrian king, allowed himself to be baptised. After a short reign Earpwald was assassinated by a worshipper of the old gods.[69] Heathenism and anarchy then prevailed in East Anglia for three years, at the end of which time Sigebert the Learned, brother or half-brother of Earpwald, returned from Gaul, in which country he had spent some years, having incurred for some reason the hatred of Redwald. In Gaul he had become a Christian and had pursued those studies which had procured for him his surname “the Learned”. When raised to the East Anglian throne, he successfully attempted the reconversion of the country to Christianity, from which it never afterwards relapsed. He also—a noteworthy fact—“established a school in which boys might be instructed in letters,” following herein the example set him by the King of Kent, and bringing his school teachers from Canterbury. In all his works, scholastic and religious, he was zealously aided by Felix, a missionary-bishop from Burgundy, who had fixed the seat of his episcopate at Dunwich, a city on the coast of Suffolk, long since swallowed up by the ocean. While the trained ecclesiastic, Felix, supplied the organising and educating influences needed by the infant Church of East Anglia, an enthusiastic energy was imparted to it by an Irish monk named Fursa, a man of vivid imagination, full of his marvellous revelations of the world of spirits, one whom, when we read the story of his visions as it is told us by Bede, we are almost persuaded to call the unlettered Dante of the seventh century. As men in Florence said when they saw the poet pass, “That man has been in hell,” so the awe-struck Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk noted on the cheek and shoulder of Fursa the scars of the burning inflicted upon him for a slight offence by the foul fiends whom he had seen in one of his visions; and they remembered how in the depths of winter, and though he was thinly clad, the sweat streamed down his face while he rehearsed the terrible story.

Thus then, in the fourth decade of the seventh century, East Anglia became Christian: and already in her history was manifested that extraordinary desire of men in high places to save their own souls at the cost of leaving their duties to their fellows unfulfilled, which was, it may be said, the glory and the shame of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. After two or three years of reigning, Sigebert abdicated in 634, received the tonsure, and retired to a monastery. He was succeeded by his cousin Egric, but ere the new king had been long on the throne, the terrible Penda (probably crossing the fens which separated the two kingdoms) invaded East Anglia (637?). Some remembrance of Sigebert’s capacity and valour in war seems to have dwelt in the minds of his late subjects, who saw themselves out-numbered by the Mercian hosts. They surrounded the monastery, and when their clamorous cries for Sigebert failed to draw him from his retirement, they pulled him out by main force and compelled him to place himself at their head. But he, mindful of his vow, refused to arm himself with any other weapon than a rod, and remained passive through all the tumult of the battle. He was slain and Egric with him; the East Anglian army was cut to pieces, and Penda, as usual, triumphed.

It will be observed, however, that in these inter-Anglian contests annexation scarcely ever follows victory. The conquered people choose another king, over whom the conqueror no doubt asserts some sort of supremacy, and all goes on as before. So was it now. Anna, the son of Eni, of the royal East Anglian stock, but how nearly related to Sigebert we are not informed, succeeded his kinsman and reigned for some seventeen or eighteen years (637–654). During this time, as we have seen, he gave shelter to the fugitive King of Wessex, Cenwalh, and converted him to Christianity. He is chiefly noted for his “saintly progeny” of daughters and granddaughters, some of whom married into the royal houses of Kent and Mercia, carrying thither their enthusiastic zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith, and nearly all of whom became eventually abbesses in Britain or Gaul. The reign of this excellent king came to an end about 654. It is scarcely necessary to state the cause of his death. He was slain, probably slain in battle, by the nearly octogenarian Penda. Thus had three kings of East Anglia as well as two kings of Northumbria fallen before the all-conquering Mercian. But the tale of his victories was well-nigh told. Let us turn back to consider what had been happening in Northumbria during the twelve years that had elapsed since the death of Oswald.

Two kings, as has been said, with perplexingly similar names, had been, perhaps by some tumultuary vote of their countrymen, raised to the two now separate Northumbrian thrones: Oswy, son of Ethelfrid, to reign in his great grandfather Ida’s palace at Bamburgh, as king of Bernicia; Oswin, collateral descendant of Aelle and Edwin, to reign at York over Deira. Soon after his accession Oswy, who though only about thirty years of age, was a widower with at least two nearly grown-up children, sent a priest named Utta, “a man of much gravity and truth, and for that reason held in high honour even by princes,” to solicit from the king of Kent the hand of his niece Eanfled, the exiled daughter of Edwin of Deira. It was arranged that Utta should travel to Kent by land, but—perhaps from fear of robbers—he was to return with the maiden by sea. Before his departure the priest sought Aidan’s blessing and prayers for his safe journey. The saint foretold that he would meet with contrary winds, rising to a tempest, but gave him a bottle of holy oil to cast upon the raging waters. All happened as Aidan had foretold. The ship in which Utta and his precious charge were embarked was assailed by a tremendous storm: no anchors would hold; the sailors, finding the ship beginning to fill with water from the waves that swept over her, gave themselves up for lost. Then the priest, remembering Aidan’s gift, poured oil from his flask upon the waters and the sea ceased from its raging. Probably the violence of the storm has been somewhat exaggerated by the narrators; but it is interesting to note that modern seamanship does not disdain to use an expedient which in the seventh century was deemed miraculous. One object in Oswy’s matrimonial alliance was doubtless that of strengthening his claim on the men of Deira by his union with Edwin’s daughter. Another result which he perhaps did not foresee was the revival in an acuter form of the strife between the Roman and Celtic Churches for the possession of Northumbria, since Eanfled represented the Roman Christianity of Augustine and Paulinus, while Oswy, like Oswald, had learned in his youth the Christianity of the Hebrides which was represented by his friend the saintly Aidan.

It was probably more or less the aim of every Northumbrian king to reunite the two kingdoms over which Edwin and Oswald had ruled as one realm. Thus Oswy may from the beginning have seen with impatience the rival power of Oswin of Deira. The latter was a man dear alike to martial thane and to devout Churchman: “fair of face, tall of stature, pleasant of speech, courteous in manner, and open-handed both to the noble and to the base-born. This truly royal dignity of his, displayed both in his looks and in his actions, won for him the love of all, so that from nearly all the [other] provinces [of the land] men of noblest birth flocked to do him service.”

To this kingly soul was conjoined the virtue, rare in kings, of humility, to illustrate which Bede tells a well-known story. It appears that Aidan, from his island home in Lindisfarne, now often extended his missionary journeys far and wide through Deira, and, though he made a point of travelling on foot, had accepted from Oswin the present of a horse to enable him to cross the manifold rivers of Yorkshire. Meeting one day a poor man who asked of him an alms, and having apparently no money in his scrip, he gave to the astonished beggar the horse with all its royal trappings, “for he was very pitiful, a nourisher of the poor and, so to speak, a father of the miserable”. When the king heard this he very naturally asked the bishop the reason of his strange procedure. “I had specially chosen that horse for your use, and if it was a question of giving horses to beggars at all, I had others, much cheaper ones, in my stable which would have served your purpose as well.” Hardly with justice Aidan answered: “What art thou saying, O King? Is my steed, the offspring of a mare, dearer to thee than that poor man, a son of God?” And thereupon they went into the palace to dine. The bishop sat apart in his own place; the king who had just come in from hunting stood at the fire with his courtiers warming himself. Suddenly the reproving words of the bishop darted into his soul. He ungirded himself of his sword, which he handed to a courtier, and hastening to the bishop fell at his feet and asked forgiveness, “for never henceforward will I cavil at any act of thine in giving from my treasures what thou wilt to the children of God”. The bishop assured him of his forgiveness and bade him sit down joyfully to the feast. Oswin obeyed, and his merry laugh soon resounded through the hall, but the mantle of his late sadness fell upon Aidan who began to weep. “Why these tears, my father?” said a priestly companion in the Celtic speech which the men of Deira could not understand. “I know,” answered the bishop, “that this king will not live long. I never saw so humble a prince, and this people is not worthy to have such a ruler.”

Too soon were Aidan’s forebodings justified. In the seventh year of Oswin’s reign the disputes between the two Northumbrian kingdoms reached a head, and their armies met in the field near Catterick, in Yorkshire. Finding himself hopelessly out-numbered, Oswin dismissed his soldiers to their homes and fled to the house of one of his followers named Hunwald whom he believed to be a loyal friend. Unfortunately Hunwald betrayed him to Oswy, whose officer Ethelwin was admitted into the house by the treacherous host and slew Oswin, together with his faithful henchman, Tondheri, who had shared his flight. This deed, which was evidently considered no fair act of war, but a foul and detestable murder, took place at Gilling (near Richmond in Yorkshire), on August 20, 651. At the request of Queen Eanfled, Oswin’s near kinswoman, a monastery was erected on the spot by Oswy as a sort of expiation of his crime. Prayers in that monastery were daily offered for the souls of the two kings, the murderer and the murdered, but the blot on Oswy’s memory remained. Twelve days after the death of his royal friend and disciple (Aug. 31, 651), Aidan also died after having for seventeen years held the see of Lindisfarne. The shortness of the interval after Oswin’s death, and the close connexion with that event in which it is mentioned by Bede, seem to authorise the conjecture that grief at this treacherous murder of a Christian prince by his professed brother in the faith may have hastened the death of the toil-worn prelate. He died, not at Lindisfarne, but at a certain villa regia “not far from the city,” says Bede, “of which I have already spoken”. It is generally assumed, perhaps too hastily, that this royal villa was on the site of the modern village of Bamburgh, close to the foot of the rock on the top of which stood undoubtedly both the palace and the town of Bebbanburh. A tent was spread for the dying saint contiguous to the church on its western side. He died leaning against a buttress of the church, and the lovers of miracles noticed that when the village and the church were wrapped in flames in the course of one of Penda’s ravaging expeditions, this buttress against which the dying saint had leaned his head was the only part of the fabric which survived the conflagration.

The Northumbrian ravages of Penda may possibly have been of frequent occurrence. Besides that just mentioned there was at least one more in the lifetime of the saint, possibly soon after the death of Oswald. In this expedition also he sought by the aid of fire to achieve the conquest of the fortress which, in fact, remained impregnable till the invention of gunpowder. Destroying all the hamlets in the immediate neighbourhood of the royal city, he collected their ruins together, an immense mass of wooden beams, brushwood, straw-thatch and other inflammable materials, and piling them up against the lowest end of the cliff, waited for a favourable breeze to kindle his fire. It happened that at this time Aidan had retired from monastic Lindisfarne to the yet more solitary Farne Islands, where, but for the myriads of sea-fowl which resort thither in the breeding season, he could be alone with his Creator. Looking across the two miles of sea which separated him from Bamburgh, the saint saw clouds of smoke arising and balls of fire flying high over the castle walls. With hands and eyes uplifted towards heaven he cried: “See, O Lord, what ills Penda worketh”. Thereat, says the legend, the wind changed, the flames beaten back from the fortress were driven upon the besiegers, who, with some of their number badly burned and all utterly affrighted, at once desisted from the siege of the city.

But there must have been peaceful intervals in the long duel between Mercia and Northumbria. In one of these intervals, Alchfrid, Oswy’s son, sought and obtained the hand of Penda’s daughter, Cyneburga, in marriage. This led to a similar request from Penda’s son, Peada, King of the Middle Angles, for the hand of Alchfleda, daughter of Oswy. He was told that the only terms on which his suit could be successful were that he and all his people should receive the Christian faith. His brother-in-law, Alchfrid, strongly urged him to the same conclusion, and he consented to listen to the teaching of the Christian priests. When he heard of the promise of a heavenly kingdom, the hope of a resurrection and of future immortality, he declared that he would gladly accept such a religion as that, even though no virgin-bride was to be the prize of his conversion. He came in 653 with a long train of thegns, soldiers and servants, and was baptised by Finan, Aidan’s successor, at a royal villa called Ad Murum, close to the Roman wall, and twelve miles from the sea. The conversion of Peada was followed by the mission of four priests to the Middle Angles, that is the inhabitants of Leicestershire. The preaching of these men, seconded by the royal influence, was most successful, and practically the whole of that tribe came over to the new faith. Mercia, properly so called, on the west of the country of the Middle Angles, was still heathen, but even there Penda did not prohibit the preaching of Christianity. He does not seem to have had any deep-rooted objection to the doctrine of the Nazarene, though it was not for him, the descendant of Woden, to worship a deity so unlike the gods of his fathers. He did not, however, conceal his hatred and contempt of those men who, professing the faith of Christ, did not bring forth works according thereto, saying that they were poor and despicable wretches who did not obey the God in whom they professed to believe.

At last when the old king was close upon his eightieth year, the ever-smouldering quarrel with Northumbria broke out again into flame. Oswy felt that the repeated raids of Penda must by some means be brought to an end. He offered quantities of costly royal ornaments as the price of peace, but in vain. Penda would give no promise to cease from ravaging. “Then,” said he, “if the barbarian will not be mollified by our gifts, let us offer them to the Lord God as the price of victory.” His daughter dedicated to sacred virginity; twelve estates given for the foundation of as many monasteries; these were his vows to the Most High, and having made these promises he moved forward with confidence to the war, though his army was much smaller than that of the enemy; though his young son, Egfrid, was a hostage in Penda’s hands; though his nephew, Ethelwald, Oswald’s son, who had been elected King of Deira, was apparently on the side of the enemy; and though Ethelhere, brother of the martyred Anna, now marched to battle in the host of the terrible pagan who had bound East Anglia to his chariot-wheels.[70] Alchfrid, son of Oswy, fought by his father’s side, notwithstanding his affinity with Penda. If we may trust the fitful light of Nennius’s history, Penda was again in this attack on Northumbria allied with the Britons, and Catgabail, King of Gwyneth, went with him to the war, but by a stealthy night march evaded the necessity of fighting.

The armies met on the banks of the Winwaed, possibly the Went, a stream in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The exaggerated traditions of a later day assigned to the Mercian king thirty regiments, each as large as the little army of Oswy, under the command of as many noble generals. Evidently, however, there was no little treachery in Penda’s camp. The Welsh king, as we have seen, deserted on the night before the action. Ethelwald, in the hour of conflict, drew off his troops, and from a safe distance watched the event of the battle. Possibly there were others in the Mercian army who at heart sympathised with the Christian king. At any rate, Oswy won a signal victory (November 15, 655). Nearly all the thirty Mercian generals, including the East Anglian Ethelhere, were killed. Multitudes of fugitives were drowned in the waters of the Winwaed, swollen with autumnal rain. Most important of all, the octogenarian Penda, the slayer of five kings, perished in the fight, and with him fell the last hopes of English heathendom.

CHAPTER XI.
TERRITORIAL CHANGES—THE CONFERENCE AT WHITBY—THE GREAT PLAGUE.

The victory by the Winwaed left Oswy undoubtedly the mightiest king in Britain. It may be convenient to enumerate here the chief territorial changes during the latter half of the seventh century which can be discerned between the succession of bishops and the miracles of saints that form naturally the chief subject of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.

1. Northumbria, at any rate after Oswy’s victory, may have stretched along the eastern coast from Aberdeen or the Cromarty Firth nearly to the Wash. We are distinctly told that “he subdued the nation of the Picts or at least the largest part of them to the Anglian kingdom,” and it is generally agreed that this must refer to the Picts north of the Firth of Forth, which was at this time the ordinary Anglian boundary. Southward, the dominions of which Oswy was overlord probably now included the whole of Yorkshire. It seems, however, to have been an accepted principle that when the overlord was king in Bernicia there must be an under-king in Deira. For seven years, as we have seen, the comely and gracious Oswin, either as equal colleague or as such under-king, reigned in Deira (644–51). After his murder and the consequent extinction of the direct male line of the descendants of Aelle, Oswald’s son, Ethelwald, ruled over the southern kingdom. Did his dubious conduct on the battle-plain of the Winwaed fail to secure for him the favour of his victorious uncle? We cannot say, but it is an ominous circumstance that soon after that event he vanishes from the scene and is replaced by Alchfrid, son of Oswy by his first marriage. We have heard of this prince as assisting in the conversion of his brother-in-law, Peada, to Christianity; we have seen him fighting by his father’s side against his father-in-law, Penda; we shall find him taking a leading part in the discussions about the date of Easter and generally befriending the Roman party; but besides these facts we hear also of some action on his part, possibly in the way of overt rebellion, whereby he added to the “labours” of his father. Whatever the date of this rebellion, if such it were, after 664 we hear no more of Alchfrid.

The mystery, however, that hangs over the life and death of Alchfrid almost heightens the interest which is attached to a monument raised to his memory, the celebrated Bewcastle Cross. There in the midst of a wide and desolate moor, as desolate, perhaps, now as it was twelve hundred years ago, rises an obelisk fourteen and a half feet high, once surmounted by a cross which has now disappeared, bearing in Runic letters the sacred name “Gessus Christus” (so must our Anglian ancestors have spoken of the Saviour), and an inscription which, though not yet deciphered beyond dispute, certainly says that the stone was raised as a memorial of “Alchfrith, son of Oswy, and aforetime King”. Other runes give us the names of Alchfrid’s wife, Cyneburga, of her sister (?) Cyneswitha, and of her brother Wulfhere, King of Mercia. An inscription seems to record that it was reared in the first year of his brother Egfrid, that is in 670. This date gives additional interest to the quaint but not ungraceful specimens of Anglian art with which the obelisk is enriched, to the flowing tracery of vine-leaves and grape-clusters, the birds and dogs, the figures of John the Baptist and our Lord, and (in the lowest compartment of all) the standing figure of a man with a bird on his wrist, perhaps King Alchfrid himself with his falcon. Even should the reading of one line of the inscription, “Pray for his soul’s great sin,” prove too fanciful to be accepted by future students, we have in the other utterances of this monument enough to invest with a peculiar interest the name of Oswy’s son and Penda’s son-in-law.

After the death of this prince, two younger sons of Oswy are spoken of on somewhat doubtful authority as successively holding the position of Deiran under-kings. It seems clear that there was in the two provinces, Bernicia and Deira, a certain reluctance to coalesce, an unwillingness of each to submit to the king chosen by the other, which it is not difficult to understand. Whatever may have been its cause, this tendency to estrangement between its two great provinces had doubtless something to do with the early downfall of Northumbria.

The southern boundary of Oswy’s kingdom was at this time a somewhat uncertain one. In the first place, what is now the county of Lincoln, or, as it was then called, Lindissi, was for generations the regular prize of war between Northumbria and Mercia. It was added to his dominions by the victorious Edwin, and if lost through his defeat by Penda, it was recovered by Oswald, but, as we have seen, so little was his yoke beloved that the monks of Bardney in Lincolnshire at first refused to give shelter to his bones. Under Penda it was doubtless again annexed to Mercia, and probably shared the fortunes of that middle kingdom until, between 671 and 675, it was recovered from Wulfhere, son of Penda, by Oswy’s son and successor, Egfrid. It was once more regained for Mercia by Ethelred, probably about the year 679, and apparently never after owned the sway of a Northumbrian king.

2. After the victory of the Winwaed, Oswy seems to have been virtually master of Mercia. He continued his son-in-law, Peada, as under-king of Southern Mercia, that is the part of the kingdom south of the river Trent, but he apparently kept Northern Mercia in his own hands. In the spring of the following year, however, at the very time when the newly converted nation was celebrating the Easter festival, Peada was murdered, and dark suspicions prevailed that his young Christian wife was an accomplice in the crime. It is not hinted that Oswy himself had instigated the deed, but doubtless the horror of it added to the dislike with which the people of Mercia viewed the Northumbrian rule. Three years after old Penda’s death, three of his veteran generals successfully conspired against the Northerner, brought out of his hiding-place a young son of their late master, named Wulfhere, whom they had till then successfully concealed, expelled Oswy’s thanes, and restored the independence of the Mercian kingdom, apparently with its old boundaries. The new king Wulfhere was a zealous Christian—as indeed, strange to say, were all the children of Penda—and reigned for seventeen years well and gloriously (659–675). We hear of no attempt by Oswy to recover his supremacy over Mercia, although, as we have seen, his son did recover that shuttle-cock of battle, Lindsey. Wulfhere’s chief wars seem to have been with the Kings of Wessex, over whom he won several victories. The extent of his power is most clearly shown by the fact that having formed a friendship with Ethelwalh, King of the South Saxons, and persuaded him to be baptised, he handed over to him the Isle of Wight and the district occupied by the Meonwaras in the east of Hampshire, which he had wrested from the King of Wessex. The son of Penda officiated as godfather to the new convert, whose example in accepting the Christian faith was followed by many of his thanes and soldiers, but not as yet by the bulk of the South Saxon people.

3. Of political events in the kingdom of the East Angles in the period now under review, we find scarcely a trace. Shut off from the rest of England by the great fen-lands, which covered almost the whole of the modern counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, East Anglia seems to have generally kept the even tenour of her own solitary way, which was at this time the way of holiness. If we may judge of the people from their rulers, we should be inclined to conjecture that, under the influence of the preaching of Felix and Fursa, this isolated district of England was passing through a phase of religious fervour like that which made its counties the stronghold of Lollardy in the fourteenth, and of Puritanism in the seventeenth centuries, sending at the latter period so many stern enthusiasts to fight in the new-modelled army of Cromwell. Of course, in the seventh century religious zeal took a direction which would have brought it into fierce collision with the Ironsides of Naseby and Marston Moor. All the fairest fruits of Christianity at this time were ripened in the cloister, and a monastic life seems to have had irresistible attractions for the ladies of the royal East Anglian race. King Anna, who, as we have seen, fell in battle against Penda in the year 654, left three daughters, two of whom were the wives of kings, but all of whom ended their lives as abbesses in a convent, and in the next generation two daughters of one of these saintly ladies (one of them also a queen consort) followed their mother’s example.

4. Very different at one time was the religious history of the kingdom of the East Saxons, represented by the two modern counties of Essex and Middlesex. When we last heard of the affairs of this little kingdom Mellitus had been contemptuously driven forth from his episcopal seat in London because he refused to administer the white bread of the communion to the heathen sons of King Saberct (617?). Since that time a generation had passed away, and Essex was still heathen. The king now reigning in London—one of the many Sigeberts who about this time perplex the student of Anglo-Saxon pedigrees—was, we are told, a friend and a frequent visitor to Oswy of Northumbria. In the halls of Bamburgh and Ad Murum the conversation often turned on religious subjects; and “How,” said the Northumbrian king, “can you think that these things are gods, which are made by the hands of men? You take a piece of wood or stone, and what is not needed for the purpose of idol-making you either burn in the fire or shape into some common household utensil which, when it is done with, is pitched out of doors and trodden under foot of men. How can these things be divine? We must think of the true God as incomprehensible, unseen, omnipotent, eternal, the righteous ruler of the world, who does not dwell in perishable substances but has His eternal seat on high. We can understand, too, that the beings whom He has created, if they will learn His will and do it, shall receive from Him eternal rewards.” Many dialogues of this kind at last produced an effect. The East Saxon king was baptised by Finan of Lindisfarne, Aidan’s successor, at the same royal villa of Ad Murum which had witnessed the baptism of Peada, the Mercian. Returning to his own kingdom he sought to bring his subjects over to his new faith and sent to Oswy for a missionary (653). Hereupon Cedd, one of a family of zealous Northumbrian converts who had been preaching Christianity in Mercia, was recalled from his work in the Midlands and sent to Essex, where he carried on a most successful mission, was consecrated as bishop, and, apparently for the first time, founded the church of London on a secure basis. Sigebert, however, was slain after a reign of some years by two noblemen of his kindred who were offended by his meek submission to the counsels of the bishop, and after one intervening reign,[71] two kings named Sighere and Sebbi reigned over the East Saxons jointly, but always in subjection to the overlordship of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, whose “sphere of influence” evidently included all the south of England with the doubtful exception of Wessex.

The accession of these two kings probably took place soon after 660, but dates as well as accurate pedigrees are grievously wanting for all this portion of history. In 664 a terrible pestilence, which ravaged Essex as well as all the rest of England, shook the newly-born faith of the people and divided their rulers. Sighere and all his subjects openly apostatised from the faith of Christ, sought out the old half-ruined heathen fanes, and began once more to worship the idols replaced therein. Sebbi, on the other hand, and the men under his sway remained steadfast in their profession of Christianity. Nor does the relapse into heathenism of the other half of the kingdom seem to have been of long continuance. The zeal of the overlord Wulfhere soon remedied that error. He sent his Mercian bishop, Jaruman, on a mission to the East Saxons, the third which had been despatched to that wavering people, and Jaruman, backed by the authority of his sovereign, without much difficulty overturned once more the idol-altars and brought back the recalcitrant East Saxons within the embraces of the Church. From this time onwards London, its bishops and its commerce become of ever-increasing importance in the pages of the historians.

5. The political history of Kent during this period offers little of interest. The king whose name figures most largely in the pages of Bede is Erconbert (640–64). He married Sexburh, daughter of Anna, one of the devout East Anglian family, and, partly perhaps owing to her influence, Church and State were more closely welded together in this than in any of the other kingdoms. “He was the first of all the English kings who by his princely authority ordered the idols throughout his kingdom to be abandoned and destroyed, and the fast of the forty days [of Lent] to be observed. And in order that these commands might be despised by none, he proclaimed fit and proper punishments against the transgressors.” Thus in Kent we have reached the second stage in the establishment of Christianity, which is now no longer merely tolerated or approved by the sovereign but dominant and in a certain sense persecuting.

6. The obscure history of the South Saxon kingdom has been already touched upon in connexion with that of Mercia. Suffice it to remind the reader that under the protecting hand of the great Midland king, who evidently wished to make of this kingdom a counterpoise to the power of Wessex, it included not only the modern county of Sussex but also the Isle of Wight and a good deal of the east of Hampshire; and that though its royal family were Christian the bulk of the people remained idolators. This religious isolation of the South Saxon people is generally attributed to the fact already alluded to, that they were separated from the rest of England by the mighty forest of the Andredeswald, that “dark impenetrable wood” which yielded in later ages to the axes of the charcoal-burners of Sussex and Kent, so that the country which we call the Weald is now left comparatively bare and treeless. It is hard for us who now know the chief town of the coast of Sussex as virtually a suburb of London, to imagine the time when Sussex, isolated in its heathen barbarism, remained virtually another world to the inhabitants of Essex and Middlesex.

7. The history of the West Saxon kingdom, for which such a brilliant future was reserved in the coming generations, is for the seventh century obscure and uninteresting. Partly, of course, this may be accounted for by the fact that our one transcendent authority for this period, Bede, is himself a most patriotic Northumbrian, and cares little for distant Wessex. But even after making allowance for this weighting of one of the scales, it is impossible not to recognise the fact that in the West Saxon line during the greater part of the seventh century we meet with no such powerful personalities as Edwin, Oswald, and Oswy, nor do we find there any symptoms which would have warranted a beholder in looking for the eventual appearance of the splendid figures of Alfred, Edward, and Athelstan.

As we have seen, the fortunes of Wessex in her conflict with Mercia were at this time generally unprosperous. In 628 there was the disastrous war with Mercia. Then came the preaching of Birinus, the baptism and death of Cynegils and his son, the accession of the still heathen Cenwalh and his expulsion by his enraged brother-in-law of Mercia. He returned, perhaps, on the invitation of his kinsman Cuthred, to whom he made an enormous grant of property (3,000 “lands” or hides) at Ashdown in Berkshire. Having embraced Christianity in his exile, he completed the conversion of Wessex to the new faith. Unsuccessful as he seems generally to have been in his wars with Mercia, he met with better fortune in his campaigns against the southern Britons. In 652 we are told that he fought—assuredly with the “Walas,” though this is not expressly stated—at Bradford-upon-Avon. He thus apparently completed the conquest of Wiltshire, and it may well have been within a generation after Cenwalh’s victory that Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, built that quaint little church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, which still stands overlooking the south-country Bradford, and which is nearly the best surviving monument of true Saxon architecture. Six years later (658) Cenwalh again fought with the Welsh at Peonnum (or the Pens, generally identified with Pensel Wood on the south-eastern border of Somerset), and this time we are distinctly told that he drove them as far as the river Parret. The larger half of the county of Somerset thus became definitively West Saxon, and the far-famed sanctuary of Glastonbury and the poetic valley of Avalon now owned the sway of a king who, though a Saxon, was also a Christian.

An important acquisition certainly: yet the very fact that it had still to be made, illustrates the extremely gradual character of the Saxon conquest of Britain. Two hundred years have now elapsed since the accepted date of the landing of Hengest, one hundred and seventy since Cerdic, one of the latest of the invaders, set foot on the shore of Southampton Water, and yet the West Saxons have only just crossed the Mendip Hills; nearly half of Somerset and the whole of Devonshire and Cornwall have yet to be won. The other records of the reign of Cenwalh relate to his battles, generally unsuccessful, with the Mercian kings. His fellow-Christian, young Wulfhere, ravaged what was left of West Saxon territory north of the Thames, as far as Ashdown. While the territory of Wessex had been in some degree growing towards the west, it was, as we have already seen, curtailed towards the east by the loss of the district of the Meonwaras and the Isle of Wight which were handed over by Wulfhere to Sussex. Altogether there was little in the fortunes of the West Saxon dynasty under Cenwalh, or under the obscure rulers who followed him, to betoken that the hegemony would one day be theirs. When towards the end of the century Caedwalla and Ine appear upon the scene, the prospect somewhat brightens, but the victories of the first and the laws of the second must be dealt with in a later chapter.

From this brief review of the relations of the various English kingdoms to one another towards the close of the seventh century, it will be abundantly evident how far we yet were from anything like national unity. There does not even seem to be any dawning feeling of fellowship of race. Angle wages with Angle and Saxon with Saxon a long and embittered warfare; and more than once a Mercian or West Saxon king avails himself of British help to win the victory over his kinsfolk. If Anglo-Saxon unity was at length obtained, and we know that it was not till far on in the tenth century that it was even approximately realised, this result was due undoubtedly to two great causes: the influence of the national Christian Church and the necessity of self-defence against the Scandinavian invaders. With the first of these causes alone we have here to deal. It cannot be doubted that zeal for their new-born Christian faith was already in some measure drawing the English kings together. When Oswald of Bernicia stood sponsor for West Saxon Cynegils, when his brother Oswy persuaded East Saxon Sigebert to forsake the follies of idolatry, a moral bond of union was formed, which might be developed into a political relationship. The consciousness of common interest in the Civitas Dei might well become, and eventually did become, a consciousness of fellow-citizenship in one great country.

In order however that the Church might exert this unifying influence on English politics it was essential that she should be of one mind herself; but at this time the unfortunate division between the Roman and the Celtic Churches on the utterly unimportant questions of the shape of the tonsure and the right calculation of Easter did much to prevent so desirable a consummation. Utterly unimportant they seem to us, and probably few ecclesiastics of any school of thought would now deny their triviality; but there is a well-known law of theological dynamics that the bitterness of feeling between rival Churches is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the issues between them; and so it proved at this crisis. Owing to the different quarters from which the different English kingdoms had received their Christianity, the religious map of England was divided in the following manner. Kent and East Anglia were firm in their following of Rome. Wessex also, which had been won for Christianity by Birinus, was steadily, though perhaps not enthusiastically, Roman. Bernicia, till late in the reign of Oswy, clung firmly to the teachings of Iona. Deira seems to have been generally on the same side, though the remembrance of the teaching of Paulinus, kept alive, as it was, by the teaching of his follower James the Deacon, had probably modified the strength of its Celticism; and Alchfrid the king, influenced by the persuasions of his friend Cenwalh, King of Wessex, had embraced with fervour the party of Rome. Mercia and Essex, both of which had been evangelised by Northumbrian missionaries, seem to have been somewhat half-hearted in their adherence to the Celtic traditions.

Such being the condition of things, Oswy, in conjunction with his son and colleague, Alchfrid, convoked in the year 664 a synod at Streanæshalch to discuss the thorny question of the difference between the Churches. The place was well fitted to be the scene of a memorable meeting. Its Saxon name, which, according to Bede, signified lighthouse-bay, well indicates that conspicuous cliff on the Yorkshire coast which we now know so well by the more common-place name of Whitby, given to it some three centuries later by its Danish destroyers and rebuilders. Hither, to this wind-beaten rock, had the holy Hilda, great-niece of Edwin of Deira, removed her convent from the more northern Hartlepool; and here she dwelt, ruling her double monastery of monks and nuns in all gentleness and purity, while the little Elfleda, Oswy’s youngest daughter, whom he had vowed to God on the eve of his great battle with Penda, was growing up under her tuition into all the virtues of a perfect nun, and preparing to take her place one day as abbess of the convent. To the student of English literature Whitby monastery is for ever memorable as the home of the first English poet, Caedmon, who there, while sitting in the cow-byre, received the command from a heavenly visitor to sing “the beginning of things, the going forth out of Egypt, the suffering and the resurrection of the Lord”.

At this place, then, all that was eminent for holiness in the infant Church of Northumbria came together to discuss the then all-important question of the true date for the keeping of Easter. However uninteresting from a religious point of view this question may now appear, the practical inconvenience of its unsettled condition was clearly seen in the household of King Oswy. Here was he, following the Celtic usage, celebrating his Easter feast on the fourteenth day of the lunar month which included the vernal equinox, while his wife, Eanfled, daughter of Edwin and granddaughter of Ethelbert of Kent, refused to recognise as a possible Easter any Sunday earlier than the fifteenth of the same month. Hence it might possibly happen, nay, in the very next year after the council it actually would have happened, that in the very same palace the king would be celebrating Easter Sunday with all the feasting and the gladness which were considered the suitable accompaniments of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, while the queen and all the holy men and women of her party would be sitting in the sadness of Lent preparing to follow in imagination the Dolorous Way by which on the successive days of Passion week the Saviour would be led up to the crowning grief of Calvary. The difference, as the fair-minded Bede is careful to explain, was not the same as that which separated the so-called Quarto-decimans from the Western Church, and which was finally condemned at the Council of Nicæa. That party, adhering strictly to the Jewish usage, celebrated Easter at the same time as the old Passover on “the fourteenth day of the first month,” on whatever day of the week that day might happen to fall. Not so, however, with the sons of Iona. Columba, Aidan and all the saints of the old Celtic Church remembered the Crucifixion on a Friday and the Resurrection on a Sunday, whether those days fell on the fourteenth or sixteenth of the lunar month or not. Thus the correct date for the Christian seasons for both parties had to be arrived at by a compromise between the week reckoning and the month reckoning; the only question at issue being the form of that compromise and the limits of permitted deviation. The Celt contended that the pendulum must swing between the fourteenth and the twentieth days of the moon’s age; while the Roman ecclesiastic allowed it to swing only between the fifteenth and the twenty-first. A small difference truly to cause such long and heated arguments, yet, as we have seen, where a house was divided against itself on this question, it might occasion no little practical inconvenience.

There was much that was illogical and unscientific in the arguments on both sides of the controversy. The fathers from Iona were fond of appealing to the authority of the beloved Apostle John, which, so far as it proved anything, proved not their contention but that of the old, universally condemned Quarto-decimans. The supporters of the Roman usage loudly asserted the necessity of following St. Peter, who certainly cannot be proved, nor can with much probability be even conjectured, to have ever expressed an opinion on the point at issue between the Churches. Much stress did they also lay on the unchanging custom of the Roman Church, whereas that Church had in fact shown its good sense by modifying its calendar in some important particulars in deference to the calculations of the more scientific fathers of Alexandria. Doubtless the real arguments, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, were on the one side the remembrance of saintly Christian lives, such as those of Columba and Aidan, producing a natural reluctance to admit that such men had lived and died in grievous error; and on the other side a feeling of impatience that the inhabitants of a few rocky islands in the wild Atlantic should set their judgment against the richly endowed and stately Churches of Paris, Arles and Vienne, of Milan and of Rome.

On the Celtic side of the controversy were ranged the saintly Hilda herself, and Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who, after the short intervening episcopate of Finan, had succeeded to the dignity held by the universally venerated Aidan. It was probably hoped, too, that King Oswy would be a stout defender of the usages which he and his brothers had learned in their long boyish banishment at Iona. On the other side, eager for union with Canterbury and Rome, stood Eanfled, the queen, and her step-son, Alchfrid of Deira. There, too, was James the Deacon, the follower of Paulinus, who for thirty-one years had maintained the cause of Roman Christianity in Deira. Highest in ecclesiastical rank on this side was Agilbert the Frank, Bishop of Dorchester, a learned man who had studied for some years in Ireland—then a great centre of theological study—but had apparently not cared to add the knowledge of Anglo-Saxon to his other accomplishments, for we are told that Cenwalh, King of Wessex, once his friend and admirer, growing weary at length of his “barbarous” way of talking, planted down at Winchester a rival bishop who could talk with him in Saxon. This gave Agilbert such offence that he resigned his diminished see of Dorchester, and returned to Gaul, where he was appointed Bishop of Paris. That migration was, however, yet in the future, and it was still as Bishop of the West Saxons, though possibly of the divided see, that Agilbert appeared to support his sovereign’s friend, Alchfrid, in the great controversy. The hint about Agilbert’s “barbarous” Frankish language is especially interesting to the philologer as showing how widely the language of the Franks, probably from its admixture with degenerate Latin, was beginning to diverge from the kindred Anglo-Saxon. Two generations previously at the court of Ethelbert, the Kentish courtiers seem to have conversed without difficulty with the companions of their Frankish queen.

When all were seated, King Oswy arose and made a speech on the need for unity of practice between men who were all seeking the same heavenly kingdom. Let them inquire which was the true rule for the calculation of Easter, and all follow that. He then called on his own bishop, Colman, to set forth the reason for his rule. Colman replied with the usual reference to the holiness of his predecessors and to the authority of the beloved Apostle John. Bishop Agilbert being called upon to reply, acutely conscious of his inability to speak in the English tongue, prayed that the task of replying might be assigned to one of his disciples, named Wilfrid the presbyter, who fully shared all his opinions and could clearly set them forth in the king’s own language without the intervention of an interpreter.

Herewith there stepped on to the stage of English history an actor who was never to be long absent thence through more than forty troublous years. Wilfrid, who was now about thirty years of age, was the son of a Northumbrian thegn, a youth brought up in the rude luxury of a rich Anglian’s hall, with horses, armour and goodly raiment at his disposal; but at the age of fourteen a harsh step-mother in his home, and some instinct of aspiration after a holier life, sent him to Lindisfarne, where he learned much, but gradually became dissatisfied with the Celtic position of isolation from Rome. Queen Eanfled, encouraging his disaffection, assisted him to visit the court of her cousin, Erconbert of Kent, from whence in his twentieth year he set out for Rome. On his way through Gaul the bright and handsome Northumbrian had offers of worldly preferment and a rich marriage from the Archbishop of Lyons, but refusing all such worldly advantages, he pressed on to “the tombs of the apostles”. Though to the reader of the pontifical annals, Rome in the middle of the seventh century, with its Monotheletic controversy and its Lombard wars, may not seem a very inspiring theme, it is clear that the great world-city, with its stately ruins and statelier church-organisation, exerted a powerful fascination over the mind of the young Northumbrian, and during all the rest of his life we find him, like another Loyola, staunch in his resolve to live or die for the defence of the Holy See. He learned from a certain Archdeacon Boniface “the daily lessons from the four gospels, the reasonable mode of calculating Easter, and many other things relating to the discipline of the Church of which he had been ignorant in his own country,” and then returning through Gaul he again visited his friend, the Archbishop of Lyons, and received from him the monastic tonsure. The archbishop was still minded to make him his heir, and apparently with some such expectation Wilfrid remained for three years in attendance upon him. By one of those reverses of fortune to which the courtier-prelates of Merovingian Gaul were frequently subject, Wilfrid’s patron lost both office and life, and Wilfrid himself narrowly, and only on account of his foreign origin, escaped sharing his doom.[72] Returning at last (in 658), after long wanderings, to his native Deira, he there found Alchfrid reigning, a man like-minded with himself in his preference of Rome to Iona. He settled eventually in a monastery at Ripon, from which Eata, friend and pupil of Aidan, had been expelled on account of his adherence to the Celtic usages by the hotly partisan king. Here Wilfrid, a year before the convocation of the synod, had been ordained as priest by Bishop Agilbert and installed as abbot of the monastery, which seems to have been to the end of his days the most dearly loved of his homes.

Such was the man, already well versed in the Paschal controversy, and deeply tinged with the Roman and Gaulish contempt for the religion of the Hebrides, to whom the grateful task was assigned of demolishing the arguments of Colman. “The Easter which we observe,” said he, “is that which I myself have seen celebrated at Rome, home and burial-place of the two great apostles. Wheresoever I journeyed, intent on learning and on prayer, throughout Italy and Gaul I found this feast celebrated. This feast, Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, nay, and the whole Christian world through all its various nations and languages do observe, save only these two obstinate nations, the Picts and the Britons (inhabitants of the two furthest isles in the ocean and of only a part even of them), who do with stupid energy strive against the opinion of the whole world.” So spoke the haughty, foreign-fashioned ecclesiastic; and when we have heard this first tactless utterance of his, we are the better able to understand why all the forty years of his episcopate were more or less passed in strife. Colman plaintively asked if Wilfrid would call the blessed apostle John stupid. Wilfrid replied that St. John like St. Paul might do many things to conciliate Jewish prejudice, and that after all, his usage being that of the earlier Quarto-decimans, did not coincide with the Celtic Easter which must always fall on a Sunday. “No,” he ended, “you who shut out the 21st day of the moon from your calculation, agree neither with John nor with Peter, neither with the Law nor with the Gospel.”

The debate then drifted off into a discussion of “the cycle of Anatolius,”[73] and an appeal by Colman to the virtues of Columba and his successors who had kept the Celtic Easter. “Surely,” he pleaded, “the miracles which they had wrought showed that their teaching was acceptable in the sight of God.” “I do not deny,” answered Wilfrid, “that these men of whom you thus speak were God’s servants. I think that if any Catholic calculator had come to them and taught them the better way, they would have obeyed his monitions. And however holy your, or I would rather say our, Columba may have been, however mighty in signs and wonders, can you prefer his authority to that of the blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom the Lord said, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven’?” As Wilfrid made this closing quotation the king turned to Colman and said: “Is it true that these words were spoken by the Lord to Peter?” “It is true, O king!” was the answer. “Can you produce any instance of a similar power conferred on your Columba?” “We have none,” answered Colman. Said the king: “Do both parties agree without controversy on this point, that these words were spoken pre-eminently to Peter and that to him the keys of heaven were granted by the Lord?” Both answered: “We do”. Thereupon the king thus announced his conclusion: “Then I say to you that this is the door-keeper whom I am loth to contradict, and whose ordinances I desire to obey to the utmost of my power, lest haply when I arrive at the doors of the kingdom there shall be none to open them unto me if I have lost the favour of him who keeps the keys thereof”.

The Bernician king evidently conceived of heaven as of a Northumbrian palace hall: and not unnaturally he, who knew his hands to be stained with the blood of his gracious kinsman Oswin, desired to enlist the sympathies of the most powerful patron possible on his side against the day when he should have to plead for entrance therein. Oswy’s decision was, of course, final. All over Northumberland the Roman customs as to Easter and the tonsure now prevailed. Bishop Colman, who could not reconcile himself to the new ways, abdicated his see and returned to Iona, accompanied by all the Irish monks from Lindisfarne and by thirty Anglian brethren who shared their opinions. From Iona he afterwards went to Ireland and founded a monastery on an island off the coast of Mayo, which had not a very successful career. Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons, who had acted as interpreter and to some extent as mediator between the two parties, accepted the decision of the synod, and returned to enforce it in London and the rest of his diocese. Everywhere now throughout Teutonic Britain unity with Rome was established, and little more than a century elapsed before all the Celtic communities in Iona, in Ireland, even in sturdy recalcitrant Wales, had adopted the Roman Easter and the coronal tonsure.[74]

The change was one which probably ought upon the whole to be considered beneficial. Unity was the thing now most needed, both politically and ecclesiastically, and unity had to be achieved by the State through the Church. It was, therefore, well that this pebble, which broke the full flow of the stream towards unity, should be removed out of the way by the synod of Whitby. It was well, also, that there should be no hindrance to free and full intercourse between the ecclesiastics of England and those of the continent. True, the civilisation of Italy and Gaul in the seventh century was nothing to boast of. To Cicero or to Marcus Aurelius it would have seemed like barbarism: but it was superior to the barbarism of the Saxon, perhaps in some respects superior even to the undoubtedly high civilisation, at this time, of Celtic Tara and Armagh. Still it was not all gain that resulted from the decision of the synod of Whitby and the rupture of the spiritual bond that had bound Lindisfarne to Iona. Even Bede, with all his loyalty to Rome and abhorrence of the Celtic Easter, seems to feel this fact; else why does he introduce just at this point an eloquent panegyric on the simple life of Colman and his predecessors, their genuine poverty and the faithfulness with which they at once handed to the poor any money which they received from the rich? “At that time the religious habit was held in great veneration, so that wheresoever cleric or monk appeared, he was joyfully welcomed by all as the servant of God; those who met him on the road with bent necks rejoiced to receive the blessing of his lips or of his extended hand: they listened eagerly to his words of exhortation. The priests and clerics of that day had no care for anything else but preaching, baptising, visiting the sick—in a word, for the salvation of souls. So utterly were they delivered from the poison of avarice, that no one of them would receive land or presents even for the building of monasteries, unless absolutely compelled to do so by secular rulers.” In these and similar sentences Bede hints at the degeneracy of his own times and seems to mourn that more of the spirit of Iona had not lingered in the Anglian Church. In Columba, Aidan, Colman and their disciples, as has been already said, we seem to see something of that absolute indifference to wealth, that kinship with Nature and her children, that almost passionate love for Poverty and the Poor which, six centuries later, was to shed a halo round the head of Francis of Assisi. These men were zealous missionaries, “humble and holy men of heart”: the men who were about to replace them in the organised and regularly affiliated Church, though by no means devoid of missionary zeal, nor of the spirit of self-denial, were before all, great ecclesiastics and lordly rulers of the Church.

The year 664 which witnessed the assembling of the synod at Whitby was, for other reasons, a sadly memorable one to the English nation. In that year, on May 1, there was a total eclipse of the sun, and this, to the unscientific minds of our ancestors, seemed to be in some mysterious way connected with a terrible visitation of pestilence which, apparently in the summer and autumn, swept over our island, beginning at the southern shore and from thence passing northward till it reached Northumbria, and crossed over into Ireland; everywhere carrying off multitudes of people. On July 14, Erconbert, King of Kent, and Deusdedit, archbishop, both died within a few hours of each other, apparently smitten by the pestilence. Later on, probably in the same year, Tuda, the new Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Cedd, the interpreter-bishop of the Whitby synod, fell victims to the same wide-wasting enemy. We have already had occasion to notice the effect which this terrible calamity had in causing many of the East Saxons to relapse for a time into idolatry. The stories concerning the plague with which Bede crowds his pages are generally of the edifying death-bed sayings uttered by its victims and the visions of supernal bliss vouchsafed to them before their departure. Intent on these spiritual aspects of the visitation, and not sparing his readers one of the miracles which he had heard of as marking its course, Bede has not recorded any of its physical symptoms as Thucydides has done in his memorable description of the Plague of Athens. We learn, however, from other sources[75] that it was intensely infectious, that one of the symptoms was inflamed swellings, and that the faces of the patients were tinged with a ghastly yellow colour. Probably, therefore, it belonged to the same type of disease as the yellow fever which is now so suddenly fatal in tropical countries. We perceive from Bede’s narrative that its force was not expended by the visitation of 664, but that it returned at intervals during the next twenty years, and that there was one outbreak of especial violence in the year 686 from which Bede’s own monastery of Jarrow suffered severely. The coadjutor-abbot Eosterwine of the sister convent of Wearmouth died of the plague in his thirty-seventh year; and at Jarrow the pestilence carried off all the monks who could read or preach or sing the antiphons, save only the abbot Ceolfrid and one little boy whom he had trained. The old man and the child kept up an abridged form of the daily service without the antiphons for one week. Then, as the tears of Ceolfrid had almost prevented him from taking part in this mutilated service, they summoned up courage to sing the whole psalter through, antiphons and all, till at last a full choir had been trained to help them to bear the burden. It is generally believed, though it cannot be proved, that the little boy who thus officiated with Ceolfrid was Bede.

In reading Bede’s Ecclesiastical History it is impossible not to be struck with the especial severity wherewith the plague raged in the monasteries both of men and women. At Lindisfarne, at Ely, at Wearmouth and Jarrow, at Carlisle, at Barking and at Lastingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the plague committed great ravages, often carrying off nearly all the inmates. The manager of a modern school or hospital will not be surprised at this, when he remembers that the monastic rule enjoined the use of woollen garments and prohibited linen; that the more ascetically disposed monks or nuns washed themselves only three or four times in the year; and that the monks lay down to rest in the same woollen garments and with the same unloosed shoes which they had worn and in which they had worked throughout the day. This self-denial, especially in the sons and daughters of princely houses, sprang from a noble motive: it had been perhaps originally ordained as a protest against the luxurious life of the young Roman nobility for whom

The Bath and Wine and Women made up life.

But it was none the less a calamity for Europe that an unnatural and unneeded divorce should have been made between Christianity and cleanliness. Sanitary science, during the long medieval centuries and even for some time after they had ended, had little chance of making its way in the world. Exactly one thousand years after the pestilence of 664 were felt the first foreboding symptoms of the Great Plague of London.

* * * * *

There is little else to record as to the reign of Oswy of Bernicia after the departure of the ecclesiastics from Whitby. In consequence of the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, the two Kings of Northumbria and Kent took counsel “concerning the state of the English Church” (this joint action of North and South in an ecclesiastical matter was itself an important event), and decided to send one of the late archbishop’s clergy named Wighard to Rome that he might there be consecrated as his successor. This step was taken probably in the year 667, and though at the time unsuccessful, for Wighard and nearly all his companions died of pestilence soon after their arrival in Rome, it led to important results.

Towards the end of his reign Oswy suffered from declining health. Like so many other kings and ecclesiastics of Anglo-Saxon stock, he desired to go to Rome and, if it might be, end his days there, and he would fain have had Wilfrid, now a consecrated bishop, as guide of his journey. With this view he offered large moneys to the young ecclesiastic—the very offer seems to show the difference between Wilfrid’s character and Aidan’s—but apparently the disease made too rapid progress for the fulfilment of his design. The journey to Rome had to be abandoned; Oswy died on February 15, 671,[76] and Egfrid his son, son of Eanfled and grandson of Edwin of Deira, reigned in his stead.

CHAPTER XII.
KING EGFRID AND THREE GREAT CHURCHMEN: WILFRID THEODORE, CUTHBERT.

The purely political events of the reign of Egfrid, as far as we know them, are soon told. Coming to the throne, as we have seen, in the year 671, he reigned for fourteen years. At the very beginning of his reign he gained (says Wilfrid’s biographer) a great victory over “the bestial hordes of the Picts who, chafing at their subjection to the Saxons and hoping to throw off the yoke of servitude,” mustered “like a swarm of ants under the leadership of an audacious chieftain named Bernhaeth, but were attacked by Egfrid at the head of his cavalry and utterly routed. So great was the slaughter that two rivers were filled with the corpses of the slain, and the victorious Northumbrians passed dry-shod over them in pursuit of the foe.” About four years later, apparently, Egfrid fought Wulfhere, King of the Mercians, defeated him and put him to flight, and thus won back that debatable land, the province of Lindsey. In 679 he fought a great battle on the banks of the Trent with Ethelred, Wulfhere’s brother and successor, who had married his sister Osthryd. The victory in this battle perhaps remained doubtful, but it brought sore distress in its train, for in it fell Egfrid’s brother Alfwin, under-king of Deira, a youth eighteen years of age, who was, we are told, “much beloved by both provinces”. It seemed as though this calamity would cause the flame of war to burn more fiercely than ever between the Northumbrian and the Mercian kings, but the Archbishop Theodore interposed his peaceful counsels. The amount of wergeld to be paid as compensation for the death of Alfwin was arranged by him. Lindsey was probably handed back to Mercia, and a treaty of peace, which remained unbroken for many years, was concluded between the two kingdoms.

In the year 684, against the advice of St. Cuthbert and all his best counsellors, King Egfrid, for reasons which we can only conjecture, sent an army to Ireland and “miserably wasted that harmless nation which hath ever been most friendly to the nation of the English; so that not even churches and monasteries were spared by the hostile band”. The Irish defended themselves to the best of their ability, but had at last to take refuge in curses and prayers to heaven for vengeance, the answer to which, in the opinion of the English historian, was not long in coming. For in the next year Egfrid, again refusing to listen to Cuthbert’s counsels, rashly ventured on an expedition against the Picts dwelling north of the Firth of Forth. The enemy, feigning flight, drew him into the recesses of the mountainous country, then turned and fell upon him, cutting the greater part of his army to pieces and slaying the king himself. The scene of this battle, which was fought on May 20th, 685, is not mentioned by Bede, but is given by other authorities as Nechtansmere or Nechtan’s Fort (Dûin Nechtan), and is identified with Dunnichen, about five miles east of Forfar.

By the battle of Nechtansmere Northumbria’s fair prospects of permanently holding the hegemony of the English states were for ever destroyed. “From that time,” says Bede, “the hopes and the manhood of the Anglian [Northumbrian] kingdom began to dissolve and to fall into ruin. For the Picts recovered the lands once possessed by them, which the Angles had held; also the Scots [men of Dalriada] who were in Britain, and a considerable part of the Britons recovered their freedom. Many of the English nation were slain with the sword, or bound to slavery or else escaped by flight from the land of the Picts.” Among the latter was Trumwine, the Northumbrian Bishop of Abercorn on the Forth, who fled from his see and had to beg for an asylum for himself and his followers from the monks of Whitby. Apparently the result of this battle was the loss by Northumbria of all the territory north of the Cheviots and the Solway as well as of the southern part of the kingdom of Strathclyde. The Northumbrian kingdom survived indeed for some centuries and even recovered for a short time some part of its lost territories, but it survived for the most part in a maimed and enfeebled condition like the Athenian state after the battle of Aegospotami. The prestige of the kingdom was gone; no more did any great Bretwalda issue his commands to subject princes from his rock-built palace at Bamburgh; and soon anarchy and intestine feuds completed the ruin which had been begun on the fatal day of Nechtansmere.

Such, as has been here indicated, is the short and disastrous political history of Egfrid’s reign; but to understand its true significance we must devote some attention to the biography of three great churchmen whose lives were closely intertwined with that of the Northumbrian king. They are:—

Wilfrid, who lived from 634 to 709; Theodore, who lived from 602 to 690; and Cuthbert, who lived from 630 to 687.

After Bishop Colman, disheartened by the defeat of his party in the synod of Whitby, had left Northumbria and returned to Iona, an Irishman named Tuda, an advocate for the Roman Easter, was consecrated as his successor, but, as has been said, died almost immediately afterwards, a victim to the plague which was ravaging England. On his death there was a discussion between the Northumbrian kings and the Wise Men of the kingdoms who should be elected to the vacant see. The choice naturally fell on Wilfrid, the champion of the Roman cause, young, noble and victorious. At the same time it seems to have been generally agreed that the seat of the episcopate should be removed from sea-girdled Lindisfarne, too full perhaps of the memories of Iona, to York, the capital of Deira, the city whose walls and palaces, even in their ruin, testified to the greatness of that Rome with whom Northumbria was now entering into such full and perfect fellowship. Objecting, however, that it was difficult to find in Britain bishops to perform the act of consecration, who were not more or less tainted with what he called the heresy of the Quarto-decimans, Wilfrid begged that he might be sent to Gaul to receive consecration there from bishops in undoubted communion with the Roman see. The kings consented: a ship, a retinue of attendants and a large store of money were placed at Wilfrid’s disposal that so the new bishop (whose preference through life was always strongly marked for the gorgeous and the stately) “might arrive in very honourable style in the region of Gaul”. The journey was successfully performed: a great assembly of twelve bishops was convened at Compiègne (664); among them Agilbert, late bishop of Dorchester, now of Paris, Wilfrid’s ally at the Whitby synod, doubtless now rejoicing at finding himself once more among men to whom his speech was not strange. These men received Wilfrid in the presence of all the people with demonstrations of high honour: they made him sit on a golden chair which was then, according to their usual custom, lifted on high and borne by the hands of bishops alone into the oratory, while hymns and canticles sounded through the choir.

Were the stately ceremonies and the well-furnished episcopal dwellings of Merovingian Gaul too attractive to the æsthetic soul of Wilfrid, and was he loth to return to the rude wooden churches and the rough untrained psalmody of his fatherland? This can only be conjectured, but it seems certain that he committed one of the great errors of his life by lingering too long, certainly for more than a year, in Gaul, instead of returning at once to Northumbria and there beginning his episcopal career. At last, in the year 666, he set sail for England, accompanied, says his biographer, by 120 armed retainers besides his clerical followers. The clergy sang loud their psalms, to cheer the arms of the rowers, but in the midst of their psalmody a mighty tempest arose and drove them on the coast of Sussex. The inhabitants, still heathen and barbarous, flocked to the stranded vessel and began to strip it of its treasures and to divide its passengers among them as their slaves. Wilfrid offered them money and spoke words of peace and conciliation, but the natives proudly answered, “All is ours that the sea throws up on the shore”. Meanwhile, a priest of the Saxon idolatry, standing on a high mound near the shore, ceased not to curse the Christian strangers and sought by his magic arts to render vain their efforts for deliverance. At last one of Wilfrid’s companions flung a stone—“a stone,” says his biographer, “blessed by all the people of God”—which hit the high priest on the head and wounded him to the death. His fall discouraged the South Saxons; the 120 soldiers fought bravely with the much larger forces of their foes; Wilfrid and his clergy prayed like Moses, Aaron and Hur upon the mountain; the Saxons were thrice repulsed, and at length victory, cheaply earned by the loss of five of Wilfrid’s followers, crowned the exertions and the prayers of the Northumbrians. A miraculously early tide floated the vessel off the shore and she reached Sandwich without further misadventure.

But when at last Wilfrid reached his diocese, he found unpleasant tidings awaiting him there. Weary of his long delay, King Oswy had appointed Bishop Ceadda (famous in English hagiology as St. Chad) to the bishopric of York. The act was certainly irregular, and Wilfrid had good cause to complain, but with more meekness than might have been looked for, he accepted the rebuff and retired to his dearly loved monastery of Ripon, a place which more than all others, except perhaps Hexham, was enriched by his labours and preserves his memory. Moreover, at the request of Wulfhere of Mercia and Egbert of Kent he undertook some volunteer episcopal work in those two kingdoms, travelling about with his band of singers, masons, and teachers of every kind of art, and everywhere founding monasteries or reforming them according to the strict rule of St. Benedict which he had minutely studied at Canterbury.

After three years this parenthesis in Wilfrid’s life came to an end, owing to the intervention of the new archbishop, Theodore, to whose history we now turn. We have seen that the Kings of Northumbria and Kent, taking counsel together after the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, sent Wighard to Rome as the bearer of their request that he might be consecrated archbishop, and that after their arrival in Rome Wighard and nearly all of his companions fell victims to the pestilence then raging in the Eternal City. Thereupon the Pope, Vitalian, whose courage and skill had already been displayed on the occasion of the unwelcome visit of the Emperor Constans to Rome, deliberated anxiously with his council on the question whom he should send as archbishop to Canterbury in place of the dead Englishman. After some hesitation and two refusals of the dignity, his choice fell upon Theodore, a learned Greek monk, who was at that time living in Rome and who had possibly come over to Italy in the train of the Emperor Constans. Theodore, who was, like the apostle Paul, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, was now sixty-six years of age, and dreaded not so much the duties of the office as the hardships of the long journey to a remote and chilly island. However, the abbot, Hadrian, an African, who had himself refused the offered dignity and had recommended Theodore to the Pope, volunteered to accompany his friend, having already twice made the journey through Gaul; and Vitalian, who seems to have entertained some groundless fear as to the perfect orthodoxy of this Greek monk on the great question of the Monothelete controversy, gladly consented to this arrangement. But however free Theodore might be from Greek errors of doctrine, the fashion of his tonsure, which professed to be after the example of St. Paul, and which consisted in the shaving of the whole head, declared but too plainly to the world his Greek origin. He had therefore, after being ordained sub-deacon, to wait four months till his hair had grown sufficiently to enable him to receive the Roman tonsure, which made a crown of baldness on the top of the head. He was then consecrated archbishop by Vitalian, and set forth on May 27, 668, with his friend Hadrian for his distant diocese. His journey through Gaul seems to have been performed in a very leisurely manner, and we are expressly told that he tarried for a long time with Agilbert, by whom he was cordially received, and with whom he doubtless had much conversation concerning affairs on the other side of the channel. Meanwhile Egbert, King of Kent, being informed of the events which had happened at Rome, sent his “prefect” Radfrid to escort Theodore into his kingdom. But notwithstanding this special embassy, we are told—and the information throws a curious light on the European politics of the time—that Ebroin, the all-powerful mayor of the palace, would not permit Hadrian to accompany his friend, because he suspected that he was the bearer of some message from the Emperor to the kings of Britain, which might be adverse to the interests of the Frankish kingdom. It is with some surprise that we learn that a statesman of the seventh century contemplated the possibility of a combination of England and Constantinople against France. After a time Ebroin, having satisfied himself that no secret embassy such as he feared had ever formed part of Hadrian’s instructions, permitted him to follow Theodore, by whom he was made abbot of the great monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul at Canterbury, the Westminster Abbey of the Kentish kingdom.

Theodore of Tarsus arrived at Canterbury and was enthroned there on May 27, 669, thus commencing a memorable career, which lasted for more than twenty-one years. “Soon,” says Bede, “having traversed the whole island wherever the tribes of the English abode, and being heartily welcomed and listened to by all, he spread abroad the right way of living and the canonical rule for the celebration of Easter; Hadrian everywhere appearing as his companion and helper. For he was the first of the archbishops to whom the whole Church of the English agreed to give the hand of fellowship.” We see at once how great a step towards national unity, at least as far as the English people was concerned, was taken under the guidance of this Oriental stranger, who came from under the shadow of Mount Taurus. Unfortunately there is no evidence that he did anything to break down the middle wall of partition which the arrogance of Augustine had raised between the English and the Welsh Churches; while, to the yet unreconciled Celts of Ireland and the Hebrides his very appointment was in the nature of a challenge.

Bede proceeds to describe to us how Theodore’s copious stores of learning, both sacred and secular, were made available for the people. He tells us of the multitude of disciples who flocked to his daily lectures and those of his friend Hadrian; of the knowledge “of the metrical art, of astronomy and of ecclesiastical arithmetic,” which, along with the sacred Scriptures, they imparted to their hearers. “A proof hereof is,” says he, “that to this day there survive some of their disciples, who know the Latin and Greek tongues as well as that wherein they were born. Nor in fact were there ever happier times since the days when the English first landed in Britain, since now, under the leadership of most valiant and Christian kings, they were a terror to all the barbarous nations; the desires of men were strongly directed towards the new-found joys of the heavenly kingdom; and all who desired to be instructed in the sacred Scriptures had teachers near at hand, who could impart to them that knowledge.” There can be no doubt that Theodore possessed a genius for organisation such as had not been displayed by Augustine or any of the subsequent prelates, and that to him more than to any other single person is due the structure of the Anglo-Saxon Church, such as it remained till the Norman conquest. One change which he perceived to be necessary for the good of the Church, but which also inevitably tended towards the augmentation of his own power, was an increase in the number of bishoprics. Hitherto the tendency had been to have one bishopric only for each of the English kingdoms, an arrangement quite unlike that which had generally prevailed throughout the Roman empire, in some parts of which almost every town that was above the rank of a village had its own episcopal ruler. Such great unwieldy bishoprics as Northumbria, Mercia or Wessex, were not likely to be administered efficiently by a single bishop, while, on the other hand, their very magnitude suggested dangerous thoughts of rivalry with a primate whose immediate sway extended only over a part of Kent. Thus Theodore was impelled by every motive, public and private, to strive to break up the existing bishoprics into smaller portions. In that process the wise but masterful old man certainly did not show himself to any undue extent a respecter of persons.

One of the first cases in which Theodore had to exert his archiepiscopal authority was that of the bishopric of York. However aggrieved both king and people might have been by Wilfrid’s long-delayed return, there was no doubt that the intrusion of another bishop into a see already filled was entirely contrary to the canons; and, moreover, from the strict Roman point of view Ceadda’s consecration to the episcopate was not safe from attack, inasmuch as two “Quarto-deciman” bishops had taken part therein. When all these various objections were stated by Theodore to Ceadda, the simple-minded and unambitious old man at once declared his willingness at Theodore’s call to resign a dignity of which he had never deemed himself worthy. “No: not the episcopate,” was Theodore’s answer. “To that I will reordain you with all due formalities; but stand aside for the present from this see, which of right belongs to Wilfrid.” Thus Wilfrid, after three years of suspension, was once again bishop of the great diocese of York, extending from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, or even beyond. For Ceadda meanwhile a place was quickly found, the scarcely less important bishopric of Mercia; and Theodore’s regard for the saintly old man was shown by ordering him no longer to perform his long episcopal journeys on foot, but to ride through his diocese. When Ceadda hesitated, mindful of his beloved Aidan’s example, Theodore insisted, possibly himself provided him with a steed, at any rate with his own archiepiscopal hands lifted him into the saddle. Ceadda’s tenure of the Mercian episcopate was short, as he fell a victim to the plague in 672. He died, however, not only in the odour of sanctity, but, what is better, surrounded by the unfeigned love of his monastic brethren, and able to speak even of the Angel of the Pestilence as “that lovable guest who hath been wont of late to visit our brotherhood”.

All the ecclesiastical events which have been described in this chapter, save the last, took place in the reign of Oswy. In the year 671, as we have seen, a new monarch, Egfrid, ascended the Northumbrian throne. He had already been for some years the nominal husband of one of the saintly members of the East Anglian family, Etheldreda, a daughter of King Anna, but she, though Egfrid was her second husband, was at heart a devoted nun and insisted through life on keeping her virginity unstained. Here was already cause for trouble in the Northumbrian palace, trouble which was aggravated by the interference of Wilfrid, who, in defiance of apostolic precept and the Church’s law, made himself the champion of the cause of the disobedient wife, and at last (probably in the first or second year of Egfrid’s reign) with the hardly won consent of her husband arrayed her in the veil of a “sanctimonialis femina”. She retired first to the monastery of Coldingham, then ruled by Ebba, the aunt of Egfrid. After a year’s residence therein she became abbess of the great convent which she had herself founded in the Isle of Ely on lands devised to her by her first husband. There, after bearing rule for seven years, she died. The signal triumph of religious zeal over worldly ambition and luxury which her life displayed was celebrated in enthusiastic and acrostic verse by her admirer Bede. She was undoubtedly one of the most popular saints of the Anglo-Saxon epoch, and her name in the abbreviated form of Audrey still possesses a certain attraction for Englishmen.

The place which Etheldreda had vacated by the side of Egfrid was at once filled by a second wife named Ermenburga, who was persistently hostile to Wilfrid, and is accordingly likened to Jezebel by his enthusiastic biographer. There was, however, much in Wilfrid’s position at this, the most glorious period of his career, which might well rouse the jealousy of the secular rulers of the nation. Between 671 and 678 he was probably the foremost man in all Northumbria. He built great basilicas, the marvels of the age, at Hexham[77] and at Ripon.[78] At the dedication of the basilica at Ripon, Wilfrid stood before the altar, which was draped in purple and marvellously enriched with gold and silver, and there rehearsed, in the presence of the Northumbrian kings, the great gifts of landed property which the royal house had bestowed upon the Church, and also enumerated the places which had belonged in old time to the British Church and to which, though then desolate, it was evident that the English Church meant to assert her claim. When his sermon was ended a great feast was spread, to which the kings and all their followers were invited, and which lasted amid great rejoicings for three days and nights.

Of Wilfrid’s wonderful churches no trace now remains above ground. We are told that the church of Hexham was “supported by various columns” (perhaps taken from Roman temples) “and many porches, adorned with walls of wondrous length and height, and with variously winding passages, leading now up, now down, by stately staircases”. Both at Ripon and Hexham the crypt “carried deep down into the earth with marvellously smoothed stones” still remains; and at Hexham inscriptions, bas-reliefs and the shape of the stones employed show us all too plainly that the Roman camps along the line of the wall were the quarry from whence Wilfrid’s marvellously smoothed stones were obtained. But the great bishop was not giving all his time to his architectural labours. He rode from end to end of his diocese, ordaining priests and deacons in great numbers, and attracting to himself the love and devotion of the powerful abbots and abbesses, who very generally, either by present transfer or by testamentary disposition, arranged that he should become lord of the lands of their monasteries. Many Anglian nobles also sent their sons to be brought up in the bishop’s house, in order that they might either by his introduction enter the life of religion, or if they preferred the profession of arms, might by him be recommended to the king. In everything that Wilfrid touched the same note of sumptuous magnificence might be discerned. Thus, on the day of the dedication of the church at Ripon, he presented to it “the four illuminated Gospels traced in purest gold on purple parchment, which he had caused to be transcribed for the welfare of his soul, also a bookcase for these books, all made of the purest gold and adorned with the most precious jewels”. But all this pomp and splendour (though coupled with personal abstinence and the practice of monastic austerities) was rearing up for Wilfrid a host of lifelong enemies; at their head Queen Ermenburga, who ceased not to remind her husband of “all the worldly pomp of Bishop Wilfrid, his riches, the multitude of his abbeys, the grandeur of his buildings, and the numberless host of his followers adorned with royal raiment and equipped with arms”.

The jealousy which the royal pair felt at the greatness of the Bishop of York was powerfully aided by their alliance with Archbishop Theodore. For the formation of this alliance it is quite unnecessary to accept the biographer’s story of bribes out of ecclesiastical property offered by the king and accepted by the archbishop. On the contrary, it might almost have been foretold by any one who was acquainted with the two men, Wilfrid and Theodore, that they must necessarily sooner or later come into collision. They were both men of great intellectual stature, both devoted to the Roman obedience and intent on bringing the English Church fully into that obedience, but they would do it in different ways. Theodore, as Metropolitan of the whole land, would enforce Church order, subdivide the unwieldy dioceses, and make his strong hand felt by every bishop and abbot in every corner of the English kingdoms. Wilfrid had no thought of resigning any part of his power over his vast diocese, in which he was virtually independent. Nay more, faint as are the traces of such a scheme in history, it is difficult not to suppose that Wilfrid was cognisant of Gregory’s original plan for the establishment of two independent archbishoprics in Britain, one at London and the other at York, and hoped to convert—as was actually done half a century later—his bishopric into an archbishopric. Such an arrangement would be far more in accordance with ecclesiastical precedent throughout the Roman empire than that which actually prevailed, since the general usage had been to place the Metropolitan in the chief city of the province. All the venerable associations which now cluster round the name of Canterbury should not cause us to forget the fact that it is merely owing to a series of accidents (foremost among them the relapse of the East Saxons into idolatry) that the chief pastor of the English Church now bears the title of Archbishop of Canterbury. Either Londinium or Eburacum, pre-eminently the latter, had better right to give an archbishop to England than the little insignificant city of Durovernis.

Intent on his schemes of Church reform and full of the paramount authority symbolised by his archiepiscopal pallium, Theodore visited Northumbria and found there in the royal palace a ready acquiescence in his grand project for the division of the diocese. He at once, in Wilfrid’s absence, ordained three new bishops who were to divide among themselves a large part of his diocese, leaving him probably the city of York and a certain part of Deira as his portion.[79] It was a strong measure to adopt, certainly, not courteous nor perhaps canonically correct in the absence of the bishop whose diocese was thus invaded; and it is no wonder that Wilfrid sought an interview with the king and archbishop, and demanded by what right they, without any cause of offence alleged against him, thus defrauded him in robber-fashion of property given him by the king for God’s service. They answered, says his biographer, in the presence of all the people with the memorable words: “No accusation is made against thee of having done injury to any man, but the decision which we have come to in thy case we will not change”. Hereat Wilfrid signified his intention of appealing to Rome (678) against this unjust act of spoliation. The flatterers who surrounded the king laughed aloud at his words, but he turned round and rebuked them sternly, saying: “You laugh now, evidently rejoicing at my condemnation, but on the anniversary of this day bitterly shall ye weep to your own confusion”. And in fact men noted with awe that it was on the exact anniversary of Wilfrid’s interview with the king that the body of the beloved under-king, Alfwin, was brought back to York from the battlefield on the banks of the Trent, and was received by all the people with tears and rent garments and passionate lamentations.

And now began that long duel between prelate and king, with visits to Rome, confiscations, imprisonments, reconciliations, repentances, which lasted with some intermissions and some changes in the person of the royal disputant, for nearly thirty years, and which in some of its vicissitudes reminds us of the contention between Henry Plantagenet and Thomas Becket. It is a history with much intrinsic interest, and rendered additionally interesting to us by the fact that the Life of Wilfrid by Eddius, in which it is recorded, was written some years before the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, and is probably the earliest extant piece of Latin writing that has proceeded from an Anglo-Saxon pen. Skilfully escaping from the toils of his enemies (whose emissaries by a laughable mistake attacked and plundered a harmless bishop named Winfrid instead of him), Wilfrid landed in Friesland, made friends with the king of the Frisians, and began that career of missionary enterprise in Germany which was continued by his disciple, Willibrord, and in later years by the West Saxon, Boniface, with vast results on European history. He then travelled through Gaul, visiting King Dagobert II., whom, when an exile in Ireland, he had sped on his way to France, and thus had helped to recover his father’s throne. Dagobert’s gratitude now showed itself by assisting Wilfrid on his journey to Rome. In Italy he was befriended in a similar way by the Lombard King Perctarit, who had himself once led the life of a hunted fugitive, and refused to surrender him to his foes. Arriving at Rome, where he spent the winter of 679–80, he laid his complaint before the recently consecrated Pope, Agatho the Sicilian, and claimed his protection. A council was held in the Lateran basilica, where Theodore’s representative, a monk named Coenred, stated the case for Canterbury. Wilfrid’s petition was read, setting forth that he did not refuse to consent to the division of his bishopric, but claiming that he should be consulted as to the persons intruded upon him as colleagues; and the synod having listened to the representations of “the most holy Archbishop Theodore” and “the God-beloved Bishop Wilfrid” decided in favour of the latter.

Armed with this papal decree, and not doubting of the triumph which it would procure for him, Wilfrid presented himself at the Northumbrian court, but was at once accused of having obtained the decree by bribery, thrown into prison and despoiled of his personal possessions. One of the most precious of these, a reliquary, was appropriated by Ermenburga to her own use, and always carried about by her, whether she abode in her bedchamber or rode abroad in her chariot. Wilfrid’s first place of imprisonment was the royal city of Bromnis.[80] On the refusal of the governor, whose wife had fallen dangerously ill, to act any longer as jailer of so holy a man, Egfrid sent him to another of his cities named Dynbaer (Dunbar), another proof, if any were needed, how far northward at this time stretched the kingdom of Northumbria. At last after he had undergone a rigorous imprisonment for nine months, the dangerous illness of Ermenburga (which seemed to take the form of demoniac possession), and the entreaties and warnings of the saintly Ebba, brought about Wilfrid’s liberation from the dungeon, but not his restoration to his bishopric. He went forth as an exile into Mercia, where he was favourably entertained by a nephew of King Ethelred and received land for the foundation of a monastery. But as Ethelred was Egfrid’s brother-in-law, he soon ordered Wilfrid to quit his kingdom. He turned his steps to Wessex and there for a little space had rest, but soon was expelled thence also, King Centwine having married Ermenburga’s sister. It is easy to see how hard the lot of a fugitive from one of the English courts might be made by the matrimonial alliances that were so frequent between them.

Thus expelled from Christian England the hunted fugitive turned his thoughts to the land of the South Saxons: “a heathen province of our race” (says the biographer) “which for the multitude of its rocks and the density of its woods remained impregnable by all the other provinces”. Here Ethelwalh, himself a Christian, as we have seen,[81] was reigning over a still heathen people, and to him Wilfrid confided the whole story of his wrongs. The king made with him a covenant of peace so strong that, as he declared, no terror of the sword of any hostile warrior and no gifts however costly should avail to move him from the troth then plighted. In this inaccessible corner of the land which we now name Sussex, Wilfrid remained for five years, preaching the story of the creation of the world, its redemption, the day of judgment, the rewards and punishments to come, with such eloquence and fervour that he achieved the conversion of the entire people, thus ending in the year 686 the long spiritual campaign for the conversion of England which was begun in 597 by the arrival of Augustine. King Ethelwalh gave him his own villa of Selsey for his episcopal seat, adding to it a gift of land amounting to eighty-seven hides.

During Wilfrid’s sojourn in Sussex his unreconciled enemy King Egfrid died. The story of his death brings us into close relation with our third great churchman, Cuthbert, to whose life we now turn. Born somewhere about 630 in the region of the Lammermoor Hills, the young Cuthbert, when he was tending sheep by the River Leader, saw one night in a vision angels carrying a holy soul into heaven. He found afterwards that it was on the same night, August 31, 651, that the venerable saint, Aidan, had died. He waited not, however, for this confirmation of his faith, but at once transferred the sheep to their owners and descended into the valley of the Tweed to seek admission into the recently founded monastery of Melrose. After some years’ residence there, he went in the train of the Abbot Eata to Ripon; but on the arrival of Wilfrid at that place fresh from Rome, and with a grant from King Alchfrid in his hand, the whole party of Celtic-trained monks, Cuthbert among them, were forced to leave the pleasant valley of the Nidd and return to Melrose on the Tweed. There, however, ended his antagonism to the new teaching. Whether actually present or not at the synod of Whitby, he certainly accepted its decisions, and after some years was sent by his friend, Eata, to govern as prior the monastery at Lindisfarne. It was not altogether an easy task to rule the monks on Holy Island after the revolution which the decrees of the synod had caused, but more by gentleness than by sternness Cuthbert succeeded in enforcing discipline, all the more readily perhaps as in food, in vigils, in dress, he set an example of rigorous austerity. But after all, neither as prior nor afterwards as bishop did he ever care for the possession of power. In character he much more closely resembled Aidan than either Theodore or Wilfrid. He loved to be alone with Nature and with God, and was ever moving about among the country folk and “stirring them up” by his conversation rather than by set sermons “to seek after the heavenly crown”. There is still shown in a cleft of the basaltic range of low hills on the mainland overlooking the winding shore of Holy Island a cave, affording bare shelter from the rain and none from the wind, where the saint is said to have passed some months of his life. “Cuddy’s Hole” is to this day the name given to it by the neighbouring farmers.

Often, too, he seems to have retired to the little island which still bears his name and which lies at a short distance from the ruined abbey on Holy Island, being like Lindisfarne itself island or peninsula according to the state of the tide. There, while apparently still holding the office of prior, he “began to learn the rudiments of a solitary life,” and when his education was completed and his spirit braced for the great renunciation, he gave up his office of prior (676) and withdrew to the more utter seclusion which was afforded by one of the little group of Farne Islands, about five miles from Holy Island and two or three miles from the rock of Bamburgh. These rocky islets, some thirty or forty in number, are now furnished with two lighthouses; and the memory of Grace Darling, the courageous daughter of an old lighthouse keeper, rivals but does not eclipse the fame of St. Cuthbert. Countless flocks of sea-birds make these rocks their breeding place; and there are seen the eider ducks, bold in their gentleness, which calmly hatch their young within a few feet of the intruding wayfarer, and whose tameness, attributed to the miraculous working of the saint, has procured for them the name of “Saint Cuthbert’s Chickens”. Was it the loneliness of these weather-beaten rocks or the sad cry of the sea-birds that procured for them the evil reputation of being “unfit for human habitation by reason of the number of malign spirits by whom they were haunted”? Howsoever that may be, it is admitted that at the approach of the man of God the evil spirits departed and the place at his prayer became completely habitable. Here then Cuthbert built for himself a little round cell made of large unwrought stones and turf, and so constructed that he could see from it nothing of earth or sea, but was forced to keep his eyes ever fixed on the heaven above him. Here, after dismissing the few brethren who had helped him in his labours, Cuthbert lived absolutely alone for eight years, enjoying the heavenly visions, but also wrestling with the awful spiritual terrors, which have ever been the portion of the anchorite.

At length in 684, Tunberct, Bishop of Hexham, one of Theodore’s intruding prelates, having been for some reason deposed from his see, a synod was held at “Twyford” on the Alne (probably the modern Alnmouth) to consider the question of the appointment of his successor. In this synod, at which Theodore himself presided, the name of Cuthbert was suggested and received with unanimous approval. It was, however, no easy matter to induce the anchorite thus to return to the common abodes of men. At last a deputation of nobles and ecclesiastics, headed by King Egfrid himself and by Trumwine, Bishop of Pictland, accomplished the difficult task, and on March 26, 685, Cuthbert received at York the episcopal charge at the hands of Theodore and six other bishops. He still, however, remained so far faithful to the wind-swept shores of the North Sea that he chose Holy Island for his episcopal seat, persuading his old friend Eata to migrate from thence to the busier diocese of Hexham.

It must have been during the long negotiations which preceded the consecration of St. Cuthbert that he pressed upon the unwilling king his vain dissuasions against the barbarous Irish expedition. Equally vain, as we have seen, was his attempt to dissuade Egfrid from that disastrous expedition against the Picts, which was undertaken in the very first months of Cuthbert’s episcopate. At the time of Egfrid’s invasion of Scotland Cuthbert was abiding at the Roman city of Luguvallium (Carlisle), which had been bestowed upon him by the king at his consecration. There also was dwelling the queen, Ermenburga, Wilfrid’s enemy, who had gone for shelter during this warlike time to a convent ruled by her sister. While Cuthbert was going round the walls of the city on the afternoon of Saturday, May 20, escorted by the king’s reeve, Paga, and by a multitude of the citizens, he suddenly stood still, leaning on his staff. With downcast face he gazed upon the ground, then looked up at the darkening sky and said with a deep groan: “Perhaps even now the conflict is decided”. He would not more plainly impart his fears, even to his own clerical companions, but hastening to the convent warned the queen to be ready to depart on the Monday for York “lest haply the king should have fallen”. On Sunday he preached a sermon which hinted at some coming trouble. On Monday came the tidings of the fatal field of Nechtansmere, fought on the very day and hour when Cuthbert had his telepathic warning of the disaster.

Egfrid’s widow, Ermenburga, according to her enemy Eddius, “after the slaughter of the king, from a she-wolf became one of God’s lambs and was changed into a perfect abbess and a most excellent mother of her [monastic] family”. Apparently there was no issue of her marriage with Egfrid, who was succeeded by his half-brother or nephew Aldfrid, either a son or grandson of King Oswy. He had been for some years an exile in Ireland and the Hebrides, and had acquired a considerable store of learning in the Celtic monasteries, so that he was generally known as Aldfrid the Learned. The twenty years’ reign of Aldfrid (685–705) was marked by few striking events. Northumbria, as we have seen, was now shorn of her greatness and was no longer the leading power in Britain. It was probably as much as Aldfrid could do to preserve his weakened and diminished kingdom from conquest by its Pictish and Mercian neighbours. It will suffice briefly to indicate the further fortunes of the three great Churchmen whose lives had been of late so closely intertwined with that of Egfrid.

The newly consecrated bishop Cuthbert did not long sustain the weight of the uncongenial mitre. In 686 he made another journey to Carlisle, on which occasion he gave the nun’s veil to the widowed Ermenburga. Here also he received a visit from an old friend of his named Herbert, who like him led the life of an island-hermit but amid far different scenes from the stormy Farnes. Herbert dwelt on an island of “that very large lake from which the young waters of the Derwent issue forth”—in other words, on St. Herbert’s Isle in Derwent-water—and had been accustomed to pay a yearly visit to Cuthbert and to hear from him counsels concerning the life eternal. He now besought his friend, whose whole soul was filled with thoughts of his coming end, to pray that they might both die at the same time, a longing which was in fact fulfilled. Soon after Christmas Cuthbert returned to his lonely dwelling on the Farnes: at the end of February he was seized by his last illness. The monks of Holy Island prayed to be allowed to minister to him in his extreme weakness, but it was not till near the very end that he suffered them to enter his cell. In the morning of March 20, 687, after many faintly uttered words of advice and farewell, the great anchorite passed away. There was no English saint, till Thomas Becket was slain before the altar in Canterbury, who filled half as large a space in the memories of the English people, at any rate in the North of England, as Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. The strange migrations of his corpse in later centuries, the magnificence of its final resting-place, the wide domains and princely revenues of the Bishops of Durham, whose chief claim to lordship was derived from the fact that they were the guardians of his tomb—all these things fixed deep in the mind of the medieval Englishman the greatness and the glory of the shepherd of the Lammermoors. Eight centuries after his death we find the soldiers of “the bishopric” rejoicing over the fall of James IV. on the field of Flodden, and tracing therein the manifest workings of the anger of the saint, whom he had offended by the demolition of his castles at Ford and Norham.

We pass from the hermit to the archbishop. Of Theodore of Tarsus there is little more which need be related here save that soon after Egfrid’s death he became reconciled to Wilfrid; asked him to come to London to meet him, and (according to Eddius) made him a full apology for all the injustices which he had committed towards him, even expressing a desire that Wilfrid might succeed him in his archbishopric. He died on September 19, 690, in the eighty-eighth year of his age after an archiepiscopate of twenty-two years, and was laid to rest in the abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, along with many other primates and princes of Kent.

The long exiled Bishop Wilfrid was at last, soon after the death of Egfrid, permitted to return home and restored to some portion of his lost grandeur (686–87). The death of the hostile king, interpreted by Wilfrid’s partisans as the judgment of heaven on his despoiler, had probably something to do with this change of policy, to which also his reconciliation with the archbishop largely contributed. His restoration was not, however, by any means to all his old dignities, though he was once again in possession of his favourite abbeys of Hexham and Ripon. And even this restoration was only for a time. After five years of peace the eternal dispute broke out again on Wilfrid’s refusal to acknowledge the lawfulness of some of the acts of Theodore. He was banished from Northumbria and took refuge in Mercia, where he dwelt for ten years (692–702). Then came one more journey to Rome, undertaken by the brave old man in the sixty-ninth year of his age. His appeal succeeded, but, as before, the decree in his favour failed to change the purpose of the Northumbrian king. Aldfrid was still immutably fixed in his determination to modify nothing in that decision “which formerly the kings, my predecessors, and the archbishop with their councillors did form, and which afterwards we, with the archbishop sent us from the apostolic see and with almost all the [spiritual] rulers of our race in Britain, confirmed. That decision,” said he to Wilfrid’s messengers, “so long as I live I will never change for the writings which, as you say, you have received from the apostolic see.” Scarcely had this answer been returned when the Northumbrian king was stricken with mortal sickness, an event in which the partisans of Wilfrid not unnaturally thought that they could trace the vengeance of Heaven for his audacious contempt of the papal mandate. It was believed that on his death-bed he repented of his behaviour towards Wilfrid and expressed his intention of being reconciled with him in the event of his recovery, but he died in 705 after lying speechless for many days, and was unable to give effect to his intentions if such intentions ever existed.

On the death of Aldfrid a certain Eadulf, of whose relationship to the royal family nothing is known, usurped the throne. Aldfrid’s son Osred was a boy of eight years old, but the faithful friends of his father, headed by Berthfrid, who is described as “a noble next in dignity to the king,” gathered round him in the fortress-city of Bamburgh. To quote Berthfrid’s words, as related to us by Wilfrid’s biographer who, of course, views all events in relation to the fortunes of his hero: “When we were besieged in the city which is called Bebbanburg and everywhere girt round by the forces of the enemy, having only that narrow rock on which to dwell, we came to the conclusion amongst ourselves that if God would grant to our royal boy the kingdom of his father, we would promise God to fulfil those things which the apostolic authority had ordained concerning Bishop Wilfrid. No sooner had we made this vow than the hearts of our enemies were changed: with quickened steps they turned towards us swearing to be our friends; the doors were opened; we were freed from that narrow dwelling; our enemies fled and we recovered the kingdom.”

This is all the information that we possess concerning a domestic revolution which, probably on account of its extremely short duration, is unnoticed by Bede. It seems to be clear that during the two months of his usurped reign Eadulf absolutely refused to redress the grievances of Wilfrid, but that in the early months of Osred’s reign a great synod was held near the river Nidd in Yorkshire to settle finally the wearisome business. The boy-king presided: Bertwald of Canterbury was there with all the bishops and abbots in his obedience. There, too, was Elfleda, the daughter long ago vowed by Oswy to the service of God, now and for many years past sitting in the seat of the venerated Hilda as abbess of Whitby: “a most wise virgin,” says the biographer, “ever the best consoler and counsellor of the whole province”. She was a great friend of Cuthbert, and had probably at one time shared the general Northumbrian or, at least, Bernician dislike to the all-grasping Bishop of York; but the letter which the aged Theodore had written, almost from his death-bed, beseeching her to become reconciled to Wilfrid had perhaps changed her mind towards him, and she now strongly pressed his claims and vouched for the fact that her step-brother Aldfrid on his death-bed declared his intention of complying with all the demands made on his behalf by the apostolic see. The result of the deliberation which followed was that the king, his nobles and all the bishops swore to maintain peace and concord with Wilfrid, and on that same day gave him the kiss of peace and broke the bread of communion with him. At the same time the abbeys of Ripon and Hexham, with all their revenues, were restored to him, and the thirty years’ war was at an end. This result was after all a compromise, and, as has been well pointed out by Dr. Bright, a compromise less favourable to Wilfrid than that which had been made before. He had lost the bishopric of York and had to be content with the less important bishopric of Hexham, but he recovered possession of all his domains and monasteries in Northumbria and Mercia.

Wilfrid had now four years of peace at the end of his stormy life. Not long before his death he “invited two abbots and certain very faithful brethren, to the number of eight in all, to meet him at Ripon, and commanded the key-bearer to open his treasury, and to set forth in their sight all the gold and silver with the precious stones, and then ordered them to be divided into four parts according to his judgment”. He explained that it had been his intention to make yet another journey to Rome and offer one of these four portions at the shrines of the Virgin and the saints. Should death prevent him from carrying this design into effect, he charged them to send messengers to offer the gifts in his stead. Of the remaining portions one was to be given to the poor for the redemption of his soul; another was to be divided between the rulers of his two beloved abbeys Hexham and Ripon, “that they may be able by their gifts to win the friendship of kings and bishops”; the last was to be distributed among the friends and companions of his exile to whom he had not yet given landed possessions. From the minute account which the biographer gives of the whole scene, it seems probable that he was one of the six faithful brethren permitted to gaze on the opened treasury, and one of the companions of the exile who received a share in the bequest.

After some further arrangements about the future government of the abbey of Ripon, Wilfrid journeyed into Mercia, on an invitation from King Ceolred, reached the monastery of Oundle in Northamptonshire, and there, in 709, after a short sickness, ended his days, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. In the forty-six years of his episcopate he had dedicated churches and ordained bishops, priests and deacons past counting. His body was taken to Ripon and there interred with great solemnity. The abbots of his two chief monasteries believed that they had secured in the departed saint a heavenly intercessor of equal power with their apostolic patrons St. Peter and St. Andrew, and their faith was confirmed when, at a great meeting on the anniversary of his death, they beheld at night a white circle in the heavens reaching all round the sky and seeming to encompass the monastery of St. Peter at Ripon with its protecting glory.

The life of Wilfrid with all its strange vicissitudes of triumph and disgrace is confessedly one of the most difficult problems in early Anglo-Saxon history. The enthusiastic panegyric of Eddius, the conventional praise and strange reticence of Bede, leave us still greatly in the dark as to the real cause of the hostility of the leading men of Northumbria, both in Church and State, towards one who seemed made to be a victorious leader of men. The vast blanks in the history can now be supplied only by conjecture, and any such conjectural emendation would probably be unjust to one or other of the disputants, to Wilfrid, to Theodore or to Egfrid. Only this much may with confidence be asserted, that the dispute, bitter as it was, turned on no question of doctrine or of morals; hardly in the end on any question of Church government. It is the possession of the great monastic properties, both in Northumbria and Mercia, which seems to be the real bone of contention between Wilfrid and his foes, and when we read of the large possessions wherewith these were endowed, ten “families” to one monastery and thirty to another (domains probably equivalent to at least 1,200 and 3,400 acres), and when we see the well-filled treasury blazing with gold and jewels, which after all his reverses gladdens the aged eyes of Wilfrid at the close of his career, we are, perhaps, enabled to understand a little more clearly what was the unexpressed grievance in the mind of the Northumbrian kings and bishops against their greatest ecclesiastic. With justice he exclaimed again and again, “What are the crimes of which you accuse me?” They had, it would seem, no crimes to allege against him, but the king felt that the vast wealth which he had accumulated made him a dangerous subject, and the bishops thought that he had abused the great position which he had achieved by his victory at Whitby, to secure for himself an unfair share of the new riches of the Church. Whatever view may be taken of the struggle, the very fact of its existence and of the somewhat sordid interests at stake shows us how far we have already travelled in less than two generations from the days of Oswald and Aidan. The victory of the Roman Easter was not all pure gain to the churches of northern Britain.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE LEGISLATION OF KING INE.

We have now nearly reached the end of the seventh century of our era, and we may well take note of the fact that it was, not for England only, a century of great religious change. The world-famous Hegira of Mohammed happened in 622, when Edwin was reigning in Deira. Throughout the reigns of the great kings at Bamburgh the invincible armies of Islam were sweeping over Syria and Egypt, overthrowing the ancient kingdom of Persia and for seven long years laying siege, all-but successful siege, to Constantinople. It may be well for us children of the Saxon to be reminded that our profession of Christianity is not older than the Mussulman’s allegiance to the faith of the Prophet. Our ancestors were idolators at the same time as the ancestors of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects in the east; the same century saw both our own forefathers and theirs converted from polytheism to monotheism, from chaotic Nature-worships to “the religion of a book”.

A very noticeable figure in the south of England at the close of this century was Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons. The kingdom of Wessex had fallen after the death of Cenwalh in 672 into dire confusion and disorder. Cadwalla, who was descended in the fourth generation from the great fighter Ceawlin, was one of the many claimants for the throne. His first victories, however, were not won over any rival competitors for the West Saxon crown, but over his South Saxon neighbours. Between Wessex and Sussex there seems to have existed in these early centuries an enduring blood-feud. The enmity was not likely to be lessened by remembrance of the fact, already mentioned, that in 661 Wulfhere, King of Mercia, had wrested the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire from the West Saxons and handed them over to his convert and godson, Ethelwalh of Sussex. Against Sussex, therefore, Cadwalla, “that most strenuous young man of the royal race of the Gewissas,” while still an exile, about 685, directed the arms of the followers whom he had gathered round him in the forests of Chiltern. He was at first successful, slaying King Ethelwalh and laying waste the land of Sussex with cruel and depopulating slaughter, but was repulsed by two ealdormen who acted as regents after the death of the king. Just at this time, however, Cadwalla seems to have made good his claim to the crown of Wessex, and with the forces of the whole West Saxon kingdom now at his back, he set himself to recover the lost provinces of Wight and the Meonwaras, and at the same time to extirpate the idolatry which still lingered in that conservative Jutish population. Herein he seems to have been abetted by the zealous Wilfrid, who notwithstanding his friendship for Ethelwalh was willing to work for the good of the Church with Ethelwalh’s destroyer, and who received from him as the reward of his co-operation one fourth of the 1,200 hides into which the Isle of Wight was divided.

King Cadwalla, though an apostle of Christianity, reflected, of course, some of the barbarism of his age. There were two lads of royal blood (brothers of the last king of Wight) who had escaped to the mainland, but whose hiding-place was unfortunately discovered. Cadwalla, who had been wounded in the wars and was resting for a time at a house not far distant, ordered that the youths should be slain; but a certain Cyniberct, abbot of the monastery of Redbridge, came to Cadwalla’s bedside and made earnest intercession, not for the lives of the hapless lads, but that before their execution “they might be imbued with the sacraments of the Christian faith”. The request was granted. The two young princes were converted and baptised, and when the executioner made his appearance “they joyfully submitted to the temporal death by which they doubted not that they should pass over into the everlasting life of the soul”.

The war of Wessex with Sussex continued and soon brought in Kent also, which came to the help of its southern neighbour. After two years’ ravaging of Kent, the king’s brother Mul, by some sudden turn of fortune, fell into the hands of the men of that land (687), and they in their rage and exasperation burned him and twelve of his followers alive, a savage deed, which was like to have made a truceless war between the West Saxons and the men of Kent. Strange to say, however, this work of revenge was not long engaged in by the brother of the victim. In the year 688, after little more than two years of bloody reign, Cadwalla, stricken with satiety or remorse, went on pilgrimage to Rome. He had two great desires: “to be baptised at the threshold of the apostles and to be speedily freed from the flesh that he might pass into eternal joy”. Both desires were granted. The devout Syrian Pope, Sergius I., baptised him by the name of Peter on April 10, 689, and on the 20th, while yet wearing the white robes of a catechumen, he died of Roman fever. He was buried in the great church of St. Peter, and a Latin epitaph in twelve elegiacs was carved over his tomb. The meteoric career of “the most strenuous Cadwalla” who reigns and ravages for two years and a half, and at thirty dies “in Christ’s garments” at Rome, and is buried at St. Peter’s, forms one of the strangest pages in Anglo-Saxon history.

Cadwalla’s successor, a remote kinsman named Ine, descended from Cerdic, but not from Ceawlin, reigned for thirty-seven years (688–726) over the West Saxons. In the sixth year of his kingship the blood-feud with Kent was ended by a treaty under which the men of Kent bound themselves to pay 30,000 coins of some kind (the denomination is not clearly stated) for the murder of Mul. The West Saxon king seems to have had but little difficulty in holding down Sussex, which before the end of the eighth century altogether disappears from the list of the kingdoms. He probably established some sort of protectorate over Essex, since (apparently about 693) he calls Erconwald, Bishop of London, “my bishop”. In 715 he fought with Ceolred, King of Mercia, at Wodensburh.[82] As the result of the battle is not stated we may, perhaps, infer that the victory was doubtful. The chief operations of the West Saxon king seem, however, to have been on his Western borders which were notably extended by him. In 710 he and his kinsman Nun, king of the South Saxons, fought against Geraint, king of the West Welshmen, and it was probably to mark and to secure the increase of territory thus won that Ine built the fortress of Taunton in the valley of the Tone.

On the other hand there were, as so often happened in the disorganised West Saxon house, troubles with the king’s own kinsfolk. In 721 it is said “Ine slew Cynewulf the Etheling”. In the next year, Ine’s own queen, Ethelburga, appears as the demolisher of the newly raised fortress of Taunton. Apparently, however, she was warring for, not against her husband, and we may, perhaps, safely connect this entry with those which immediately follow it: “Ealdbert went into banishment into Surrey and Sussex, and Ine fought with the South Saxons,” and (725) “Ine fought with the South Saxons and there slew Ealdbert the Etheling whom he had before expelled from his kingdom”. If we are not erroneously combining these scanty notices, Ealdbert an Etheling of the royal house rebelled against his kinsman, seized the new fort of Taunton, was besieged therein by the martial consort of Ine, and on the storming of that stronghold fled into Sussex, where, three years after, he was defeated and slain by the West Saxon king.

In 726, sated apparently with rule and strife and victory, the elderly Ine followed the example of his predecessor, resigned the crown to a kinsman—apparently a remote kinsman—named Ethelheard, and performed the great pilgrimage to Rome, “desiring in this life to wander round the neighbourhood of the holy places, that he might win a kinder reception from the holy ones in heaven”. According to William of Malmesbury[83] the king’s wavering and procrastinating temper was definitely turned towards the Roman pilgrimage by the exhortations of his wife Ethelburga who acted the following parable in order to give weight to her words. It happened upon a day that the king and his court left a certain tun in which they had been dwelling with a profusion of regal luxury. By Ethelburga’s orders the steward filled the rooms of the royal abode with rubbish, allowed cattle to wander through it, defiling its floors, and placed a sow which had just littered, in the royal couch. Persuading the king, on some pretext or other, to go back to the tun, she turned his natural surprise at the hideous change into an argument for relinquishing the world. “Where, lord husband, are now the pomps and delights of yesterday? Like a river hastening to the sea is all the glory of man. As hath been the delight of our life here so shall be our torments hereafter.” With these words and with the sight of the squalid habitation, she persuaded him at once to perform the great renunciation for which she had so long vainly laboured. The death of Ine was apparently not so sudden or so dramatic as that of his predecessor, but there can be no doubt that he died in Rome and never returned to his native land.

The especial interest, for us, of the reign of Ine lies in the fact that he was the first King of Wessex who published written laws for the guidance of his subjects. Till his time such legislative activity as existed among our ancestors had been confined to the kingdom of Kent, where it had evidently been called into being by the organising and civilising influence of the Roman ecclesiastics. “These are the dooms which Ethelbert the king gave forth in Augustine’s days”: so runs the title of the document which now stands first in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. This document is little more than a schedule of the fines to be paid for various offences committed. Though later legislators are a little less dry and curt in their utterances, the general character of their work is not greatly different. As with most of the barbarian codes the repression of crime and the redress of injuries is their first care. They say little about rights, much about wrongs. The rules which guided the devolution of property, and the various customs which made up “folkright” were, no doubt, deeply engraved on the minds and hearts of the people, and it is not from any formal enactment of a royal legislator, only from casual allusions to them, that we have to learn their nature and their history.

After the death of Ethelbert, law-making activity seems to have slumbered for two generations. Then about the year 680, Hlothere and Eadric, who were apparently joint kings of Kent, put forth a small collection of “dooms” adding some items to Ethelbert’s list of offences and penalties. Eadric’s son, Wihtred, in the year 696, issued another set of laws, dealing more with offences against morality and religion—with adultery, Sabbath-breaking, the worship of devils, the eating of flesh in Lent, and so forth. The strong ecclesiastical influence under which Wihtred’s laws were framed is evidenced by the preface which is to this effect: “When Wihtred the most gracious king of Kent was ruling, in the fifth year of his reign (696), ... the 6th day of October, in the place which is called Berkhamstead, there was gathered together for counsel an assembly of great men. There was Berwald, archbishop of the Britons, also Gybmund, bishop of Rochester: and every rank of the churches of the land spake in concord with the obedient people. Then did the great men with the consent of all men ‘find’ these dooms and added them to the law-customs of Kent, as is hereafter said and spoken.”

The expressions used in this and many similar prefaces in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws indicate that which is probably incapable of definition, the sort of share which the leading men of Church and State had in the royal legislation. Laws are passed in the name and by the authority of the king, but he is no uncontrolled autocrat, and for any important change in the “law-customs” of the people, the great men of the realm must share the responsibility.

We may now turn from the rather obscure and elliptical “dooms” of the Kentish kings to the much fuller and more interesting laws of Ine of Wessex which seem to have been promulgated about 693, a year or two before those of Wihtred. Like the latter they were framed “with the counsel and consent of my two bishops, Hedde of Winchester and Erconwald of London, and of all mine ealdormen and the oldest witan of my people and also of a great assembly of the servants of God”. “My father Cenred” is also named among the royal advisers, thereby raising a difficult question as to Ine’s accession to the throne while his father was still living. The preface ends, “And let no ealdorman nor any of our subjects after this seek to turn aside any of these our dooms”.

As it is impossible to give here anything like a complete digest of the Anglo-Saxon laws, we may leave unnoticed the ordinances for the repression of crime—especially the crime of theft—which constitute the larger part of the document before us, and may confine our attention to those paragraphs which deal with the tenure of land and with the ranks and orders in the West Saxon state.

In all the earlier stages of a nation’s life, before the people have begun to flock into great cities, there is no subject of more vital importance than the relation of the Folk to the Land. In the seventh century in England this was doubtless governed chiefly by old unwritten customs which needed not to be formally enunciated because they were universally understood. Two precious sentences, however, in Ine’s laws give us a glimpse of the agricultural life of that day, and, combined with information drawn from other sources, enable us in some measure to reconstruct the rural community as it then existed. “A ceorl’s homestead[84] should be fenced in, winter and summer. If he be unfenced and his neighbour’s beast rush in by the opening which he has left, he shall receive nothing on account of [the damage done by] that beast, but must drive it out and bear the loss” (§ 40). “If ceorls have a common meadow[85] or other divided land[86] to fence, and some have fenced their portion, others not, and [stray beasts[87]] eat their common arable or pasture, then those who are responsible for the opening shall pay the others who have fenced their portion for the injury that is done and take such compensation as is due from the [owners of the intruding] cattle” (§ 42).

This law shows clearly that we are here in presence of an institution, the existence of which is proved by sentences of Tacitus, by charters of Anglo-Saxon kings, by manor-rolls of many succeeding generations down to the very last century, the so-called Open Field System. This system was not socialistic nor what we understand by the word communistic, and yet it may truly be described in terms drawn from the life of to-day as a system which formed “a community of shareholders”.[88] Such a community was settled, by what means, peaceful or warlike, we need not inquire, on some land cleared, perhaps, from the forest where they founded what we should call a village, but what they called a tun or a ham,[89] to which they gave the name of their own little tribe or kinship. The memory of the Yslings may have quite died out from suburban Islington, and Birmingham is no longer the little Mercian ham where once the Beormings clustered, but there seems no sufficient reason to doubt that from some such settlements as these sprang the numerous tons and hams which dot the map of England and have given their names to a stalwart progeny in America and at the Antipodes.[90]

In the village settlements thus formed, of course, the main business of the inhabitants was agriculture, and this appears to have been conducted mainly on the Three Field System in which the land that was not reserved for pasture was put one year under wheat sown in the winter, the next year under oats or barley sown in the spring, and the third year lay fallow. Now the peculiarity of the Open Field System is this, that instead of each owner having his own bit of land separate from the rest, in which he could practise this rotation of crops by himself, the community as a whole had three large districts undergoing that rotation, and in each of these districts the ceorl (as the Anglo-Saxon village shareholder was called) had a number of separate strips of land, as a rule not adjacent to one another, assigned to him, and in the cultivation of these strips he was probably for ever helping or being helped by the owners of the strips adjoining. The system appears to us inconceivably complicated and absurd: it can hardly be even understood without reference to a map[91] in which we see the strips of varying width, but generally a furlong in length, lying side by side for a while, and then in another group starting off at right angles to their former direction, but always preserving this strip-like formation. Looking on such a map we can better understand what King Ine meant when he talked of the gedal-land or divided land which it was the duty of the ceorl owner to fence; since, obviously, if the end of his strip abutted on the forest or on the pasture in which the cows of the community were feeding, his carelessness in leaving it unfenced would work annoyance and loss to many others besides himself.

The causes and the origin of this remarkable system are lost in prehistoric darkness. It has been well said[92] that “it is the more remarkable, because with all its inconveniences of communication, all its backwardness in regard to improvements, all its trammels on individual enterprise and thrift, all its awkward dependence of the individual on the behaviour of his neighbours, it repeats itself over and over again for centuries, not only over the whole of England but over a great part of Europe”. One thinks that some idea of future repartitions, some desire to prevent any one individual or family from getting too strong a grip of the land, must have been at work here as with the Germans in the first Christian century, of whom Tacitus wrote: “They change their fields year by year, and there is still land left over”.[93] To continue the previous quotation: “the system was particularly adapted to the requirements of a community of shareholders who were closely joined together in the performance of their work, the assertion of their rights, the fulfilment of their duties and the payment of their dues”.

If we now inquire what was the extent of the land thus strangely divided which was generally owned in the seventh century by the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, we shall find that the determining factor is his ability to grapple with the necessary cultivation of the soil; or, in other words, the size of his estate is expressed in terms of his ploughing power. The normal English plough-team consisted of eight oxen yoked two and two together; and the land which it was possible to plough by such an ox-team was called in English a hide, in the Latin of the later lawyers a carucate.[94] The extent of a hide was not always precisely the same even in the earliest times,[95] and in later times there are puzzling differences in its dimensions, but as a rule it seems safe to estimate it at 120 acres.

If a husbandman had only two oxen (in which case he would generally have to rely on co-operation with his neighbours to get his land tilled) he could only hope to cultivate the fourth part of a hide. This was called a yard-land in Old English, or a virgate[96] in legal Latin. An even smaller division was the ox-gang or bovate (the eighth of a hide), which belonged to the husbandman who had but one ox to contribute to the common ploughing.[97]

The question now arises, “What was the ordinary holding of the Anglo-Saxon ceorl during the first ages after his settlement in the land, and what was his social position?” The answer, of course, must be mainly conjectural, but especially when we consider the language of Bede, and his Anglo-Saxon translators, who use “family” as the equivalent of “hide,” it seems probable that the hide, whatever its dimensions may have been, was the normal holding of the ceorl in his day, and all the indications derived from the history of the seventh century seem to point to the conclusion that the ceorl was a free man, proprietor of the land which he cultivated, liable to service in the fyrd or national army, and to certain ecclesiastical payments, but in every other relation independent. Metaphors are dangerous things, but we may probably with safety characterise the numerous and sturdy class of ceorls as the backbone of the Anglo-Saxon community.

On the other hand, whatever the normal property of the ceorl might be, it is certain that in the course of time holdings would be split up and the size of proprietorships would vary. While some ceorls—as we shall see later on—might become owners of as many as five hides and thus “attain unto thegn-right,” many more would see their holdings dwindle into virgates and bovates; perhaps even[98] the virgate or yard-land would become the typical holding of the descendant of the original ceorl-settlers. The owner of 15 acres or even of 30 acres in those days when “intensive” cultivation was unknown, would not be able to do much more than provide food for himself and his family, and in a rough, undemocratic age would be deemed a person of little account in comparison with the great thegn or the abbot of a wealthy monastery who sat in the king’s council and affixed his cross to the king’s charters. Thus we can easily understand how the status of some, by no means of all the ceorls might already towards the close of the seventh century be slowly changing from absolute independence into ill-defined subjection or payment of rent to some great neighbouring land-owner whom he was learning to call his hlaford, or lord.[99]

Owing to the peculiar mode of its division the arable land of the tun has attracted the largest share of our attention. It is not to be forgotten, however, that surrounding the three great open fields which at one time or another came under the plough, there was also a large meadow in which there was “common of pasture” for the cattle belonging to the members of the tun. Surrounding this, again, and disparting one tun or ham from its neighbour, there would generally be found a belt of forest-land, as to which we have some interesting utterances from the mouth of the West Saxon legislator. The great economic use of the forest, in addition to the provision of fuel, was its supply of “mast” for the swine, whose flesh was an important part of the food of the people. In the forty-fourth of Ine’s laws it is ordained that if any one cut down a tree under which thirty swine could take shelter he shall pay a fine of thirty shillings. In the twentieth law we are introduced to “a foreigner or other stranger”—probably in most cases a Welshman—pushing towards us through a trackless forest. “Comest thou peaceably?” is evidently the question that rises to the lips of the Saxon ceorl as he sees the figure in outlandish garb dimly moving through the trees. If the stranger would dispel suspicion he must either wind his horn or shout at frequent intervals; otherwise the West Saxon may assume that he is a thief and either slay him or capture and hold him to ransom. In the former alternative, however, he must at once make the matter known and swear that he took the dead man for a thief; otherwise he will be liable to judicial process at the hands of the dead man’s kinsmen. Again,[100] if a man burns a single tree in a forest, and is afterwards convicted, he shall pay the full fine of sixty shillings, for “Fire,” says the law-giver, “is a thief,” a secret, furtive creature that may do much mischief. But if a man goes boldly into the forest and cuts down trees for his own use, he shall be fined thirty shillings for the first tree so felled and so on up to ninety shillings, but no more, however extensive may have been his depredations, for “The axe is a tell-tale”. He could not have wielded it so long in the forest without a ringing sound which should have arrested the attention of the forester.

Of course there was an exception to the general law of the mutability of holdings in the case of the house of the ceorl with the little bit of land surrounding it. This, which we should call a homestead, was called in Anglo-Saxon a weorthig, and the fortieth law (already quoted) warned the ceorl that this must be kept always well fenced winter and summer, and that if any gaps were left in the hedge surrounding it he would have no claim against a neighbour for any damage that might be done by that neighbour’s beast rushing in through the opening.

The whole of the labour on the land of a ceorl who had the normal holding of a hide would certainly not be performed by himself and his family. We have frequent references in the laws to a servile class, generally known as theows, but sometimes—chiefly in the laws of the Kentish kings—as esnes. We may conjecture that this class was originally formed for the most part out of vanquished Britons spared by their conquerors; probably also from among the descendants of yet earlier strata of population, enslaved by the Britons themselves. It was certainly recruited by the so-called wite-theows, men probably originally of the class of ceorls, who having committed some crime and being unable to pay the pecuniary penalty for their offence were condemned to penal servitude, and in such a case generally forfeited the freedom of their descendants as well as their own. Probably the larger number of theows were in bondage to land-owners of higher rank than the ceorl, but one of the laws of Ethelbert of Kent[101] shows that at any rate the possession of a slave by a ceorl was not a thing altogether unknown. Our information as to this servile class is, however, very imperfect, and relates chiefly to the floggings to which they may be subjected for various offences.[102]

Though the position of the great body of the ceorls, if it has been rightly stated here, was that of partners in a free and independent agricultural community, it must be admitted, as previously said, that we have already in the laws of Ine traces of another, probably an increasing class of gafol gelders or rent-payers. Land in these cases was held by free men under a lord, to whom payments had to be made in kind whenever the lord visited the tenant. In Saxon Britain, as in Frankish Gaul, the king and his chief nobles lived on the produce of their estates, not by drawing half-yearly rents and converting them into money, to be spent in their own distant palaces, but by moving about from tun to tun, from vill to vill, and calling upon their tenants for supplies of food which were consumed upon the spot by themselves and their retainers, doubtless with much wassail and jollity. From an estate of ten hides the lord was entitled to claim ten vessels of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty ambers of clear ale, two full-grown oxen or ten rams, ten geese, twenty hens, ten cheeses, a full amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds weight of fodder, and a hundred eels.[103]

From the consideration of the middle and lower classes of Anglo-Saxon society we ascend to consider the rather difficult questions connected with the higher ranks of that society, the thegns, the eorls, the ealdormen, about whom the Laws and the Chronicles inform us. In this examination we should be left in almost hopeless darkness were it not for two institutions both well known in all the collections of primitive Teutonic law, and both very repugnant to our modern ideas of justice, wergild and (so-called) compurgation.

The essential principle of the wergild was compensation in money to the kindred of a murdered man, in order to induce them to abstain from righting or avenging themselves by force. Far back in the dimmest ages of the Teutonic foreworld the historical student discerns a period when all wrongs were avenged by the stroke of the broad-sword. The right, and more than the right, the sacred duty, of vengeance was handed on from father to son, and the circle widened from kinsman to kinsman, till the terrible blood-feud was like to destroy a tribe or even a nation. Then at some period far back in the ages, the idea was conceived of exorcising the spirit of revenge by the wand of pecuniary compensation. Let the relatives of a murdered man receive a wer, a payment in money, proportioned to his rank and position in the tribe, and, the family honour being thus satisfied, let them forego the right to revenge. If the injury were something less than death—if it were maiming, mutilation, the abduction of a wife, unprovoked words of insult—a proportionate payment in the nature of wer was made to the sufferer himself. The wer was purposely fixed high according to the value of money in those days, and if the offender were unable to pay it, he and sometimes his family with him became the bondslaves of the injured party. There was thus an element of prevention as well as of compensation in the punishment inflicted. But in all this we do not find any thought of punishment inflicted by the state to avenge the injured majesty of the law; nothing of that feeling which now makes the murder of the most degraded outcast a matter which must be inquired into with the utmost diligence by the police and punished by the hands of the executioner. This thought was indeed in some degree expressed by the wite or fine for murder, breach of the peace and so on, which was paid to the king or to one of his officers, but this fine was generally less in amount and always less in importance than the venerable wergild payable to the kindred.

The amount of wergild was elaborately proportioned to the station in society of the injured party—twice as high for the nobleman as for the squire, three times as high for the squire as for the yeoman (if one may be permitted to use as a very rough approximation the terms current in modern society); but it is important to remember that obligation in this system of law went hand in hand with privilege. If the wer for an injured thegn was high, it was on the level of that wer that he would have to atone to the king for offences committed by him against the law of the land.[104] The wergild tariff, however, though frequently referred to, is not regularly set forth in the laws either of Ethelbert or of Ine, an omission common to it with many of the other Teutonic codes, especially that of the Lombards. Probably the amount of wer payable in each case was so well known through long usage that the legislator deemed it needless to set it forth anew, but it is possible also that there was a variable element left, in some cases, to be the subject of bargaining between the two kins of the injurer and the injured. Some broad lines of demarcation, however, may be clearly traced. We know that the ceorl was called a twy-hynd man, because the ordinary compensation for his violent death was 200 shillings. A Welshman, however, who owned that single hide of land which seems to have been the normal property of the well-to-do ceorl, was entitled to a wergild of only 120 shillings, but if he so prospered as to become the owner of five hides of English soil then his wergild rose to the proportionate amount of 600 shillings.

The class next above the ceorl, the class corresponding with the gentry of modern times, the large land-holders who do not happen to hold any official position at the king’s court, were in the ninth century spoken of as thegns; and that word may, for convenience, be used here, though it is perhaps doubtful whether it was yet used as the simple designation of a class. In the word thegn the thought of soldiership and of service to the king seem almost inseparably blended. In the poem of Beowulf thegns seems to be equivalent to warriors.; while in the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings the Latin equivalent of thegn is almost invariably minister. In the laws of Ine these men seem to be generally spoken of as gesithcund, men who by birth were entitled to be comrades and attendants of the king; and it is almost certain that they are identical with the twelf-hyndemen, their wergild being fixed at 1,200 shillings. Higher than this these laws do not enable us to go, but the tenor of later legislation supports the conjecture that the wergild for an ealdorman or for a bishop was 4,800 shillings, for an archbishop or etheling (member of the royal house), 9,000 shillings, and for the king himself, 18,000 shillings.[105]

It will be seen that the Ealdorman is here put on a level with the Bishop. At the point of West Saxon history which we have now reached, there seems to have been one ealdorman to every shire. He commanded the fyrd of his shire in battle, he presided along with the bishop and the reeve in the shire-gemot, of which later laws than Ine’s inform us: and altogether his position may perhaps be best imagined by comparing it with that of a modern lord-lieutenant of a county.

* * * * *

Some further light on the ranks and orders in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is shown by the rather copious ordinances on the subject of that judicial process which is generally called compurgation. This name is not technically correct, as it is of ecclesiastical origin and belongs to later times than those with which we are now dealing; but we have not yet naturalised “oath-helping” as the Germans have naturalised eid-hilfe, and the word ath-fultum, occasionally used in the Anglo-Saxon laws, has not yet attained the same degree of currency as wergild. With the word “compurgation,” therefore, we must for the present rest satisfied.

We first meet with this custom in the fourteenth law of King Ine, who says, “If any one be accused of brigandage he shall clear himself by 120 hides or pay accordingly”. We naturally inquire what is meant by “clearing oneself by 14,400 acres,” and we receive further light on the question when we come to law 19 which tells us that “a king’s retainer (geneat) if his wer is 1,200 shillings may swear for 60 hides if he be a communicant,” on which the later Latin translator adds the gloss, “for 60 hides, that is for six men”.

We now see more plainly the meaning of “swearing by 120 hides”. A man accused of such a grave crime against society as brigandage must, in order to prove his innocence, procure the attestation of at least two king’s tenants (each presumably holding sixty hides of land) or twelve land-owners (each owner of ten hides), and they must swear that they believe him innocent. This is “oath-helping” or “compurgation”. This swearing process is, as has been often pointed out, not in the least like our modern examination of sworn witnesses to fact, nor does it contain the promise of our modern trial by jury. It is much more akin to the privilege allowed to the defendant of “calling witnesses to character,” a privilege which, where the evidence is only circumstantial, often has an important influence on the verdict. It must be admitted that even with us the force of such evidence frequently depends in some measure on the social status of the witness-bearers, but we should shrink from making the bald statement that a man accused of murder must produce two persons paying income-tax on £10,000 a year, or twenty persons at £1,000 a year, to declare their belief in his innocence.

The amount of “swearing power,” if it may be so called, belonging to each class of men is not very clearly stated. From the passage quoted above, with its Latin gloss, one is inclined to suppose that the ordinary ceorl swore for ten hides. It has been recently argued[106] that he swore only for five or perhaps six hides. There is, however, evidently something factitious in the ownership of land thus theoretically assigned to him. We may say, certainly, that the ordinary ceorl did not possess five, much less ten hides of land; nor were all thegns, who had probably the same swearing power as the king’s geneat, possessed of sixty hides, say 7,200 acres. We may therefore rather look upon the number of hides for which ceorl, thegn and king’s thegn were entitled to swear as a conventional mode of stating for the guidance of the judge, the weight that was to be attached to their testimony when they gave it on behalf of a man accused of crime. Perhaps also there was in this curious tariff of credibility an attempt to ascertain the extent to which the belief of the vicinage could be relied on in the prisoner’s behalf. The ordinary ceorl, cultivating perhaps only one hide, but mingling with a certain number of his fellow ceorls in the exercise of his daily toil, might vouch for the opinion of the owners of ten hides; while the king’s retainer, from his wider field of observation, could vouch for the belief of a district six times as large.

From a consideration of the laws of Ine and other nearly contemporary sources, we may, perhaps, safely arrive at the following general conclusions as to the nature of the social edifice in the eighth century. At the summit of that edifice we find, of course, the king. He is king as yet of only a few English shires, a monarch of far less importance than the Frankish kings before they sank into inefficiency, yet a much greater man than many who had borne the same title in preceding centuries. In the early history and charters of the Anglo-Saxons we are struck with the large number of persons who bear the title of cyning or rex. Edwin slays five kings when fighting against the Saxons. Four kings were reigning at the same time in Sussex, three in Essex. There were kings of the Hwiccas (Worcestershire and Warwickshire) and a separate kingdom of the Middle Angles and of Lindsey, all of which vanished leaving no trace in the so-called “Heptarchy” of later historians.[107]

All this, though partly accounted for by the tendency to treat the kingdom as a family estate and to divide it up at the king’s death among his surviving sons, shows also that there must have been a strong movement in the opposite direction, a tendency towards unity and consolidation to produce the three comparatively large and powerful kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, which are practically all that are of historic importance in the eighth century.

It may have been partly on account of the increasing majesty of the royal name that the nobility (if we may thus speak of the classes reaching from the throne down to the lowest stratum of thegn-hood) became, what perhaps they had not been originally, a class of ministri and milites, servants to the king in peace and in war. Writers on the early constitution of the Germanic states are accustomed to dwell on the distinction between the primeval “nobility by birth” and its successor, “nobility by service”. Without denying the probability that nobles of the first kind existed among the invaders of England, we must admit that in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as we know them it is the second species, “nobility by service,” in the king’s court with which we find ourselves chiefly brought in contact. When the king takes counsel with his witan it is with the archbishop and bishops, with the ealdormen, the king’s thegns and the “exalted councillors” (gethungenan witan) in their various degrees that he deliberates, with their concurrence that he makes laws for the welfare of the realm, and by their cross-made signatures that his charters granting land are attested. We do not appear to have any accurate information as to the time of meeting of the witan (witenagemot). Nor was the place of meeting by any means always the same even for each Saxon kingdom, though Winchester, Kingston, and in later times London, were frequent homes of the West Saxon witenagemot.

The functions of this great council of the wise men of the realm, the degree to which they shared or controlled the royal power in matters of legislation, of finance, of the defence of the country, are better learned by watching the course of national history than from any attempt to frame a definition of that which was essentially vague, fluctuating and incoherent. The relation between the witenagemot and the medieval parliaments of the Plantagenets must be felt to be only one of rather faint analogy. In some respects the contemporary ecclesiastical councils of Visigothic Spain, at any rate in their later phases, present a much closer correspondence of type. It certainly seems, from the language of the Chronicle, that the English witan, like those councils, had a powerful voice in the election of the king, though, unlike the Spanish councillors, the Wise Men of Wessex were, in their choice, for the greater part of the time confined to one royal line, the men “whose descent goeth unto Cerdic”.[108]