Especially we cannot afford to forget this as we reach the lowest point of the fortunes, the mental and material work and position and outlook, of Europe and Christendom. A half-barbarised world had entered upon the inheritance of a splendid past, but it took centuries before that inheritance was realised by the so altered present. In this time of change we have men writing in the language of Cæsar and Augustine, of Alexander and Plato and Aristotle, who had been themselves, or whose fathers had been, pirates, brigands, nomades,—"wolves of the land or of the sea"—to Greeks or Romans of the South; who had been even to the Romanised provincials of the North, as in Britain, mere "dogs," "whelps from the kennel of barbarism," the destroyers of the order of the world. The boundless credulity and servile terror, the superstition and feudal tyranny of the earlier Middle Ages, mark the first stage of the reconstruction of society, when savage strong men who had conquered were set down beside the overworked and outworn masters of the Western world, to learn of them, and to make of them a more enduring race.
CHAPTER II.
VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN.
CIRCA 787-1066.
he discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the sea of darkness round the little island of the known world that made up Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the only natural beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam, Saracens controlled the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was only on the West and North that the coast was clear—of all but natural dangers.