I shall have then—as I said—a great deal to say about the topography of England as well as about its books and writers; and shall try to tie together your knowledge of historic facts and literary ones, with the yet more tangible and associated geographic facts—so that on some golden day to come (as golden days do come) the sight of a mere thread of spire over tree-tops, or of a cliff on Yorkshire shores, or of a quaint gable that might have covered a “Tabard Tavern,” shall set all your historic reading on the flow again—thus extending and brightening and giving charm to a hundred wayside experiences of Travel.
One other preliminary word:—On that great reach of ground we are to pass over—if we make reasonable time—there must be long strides, and skippings: we can only seize upon illustrative types—little kindling feeders of wide-reaching flame. It may well be that I shall ignore and pass by lines of thought or progress very lively and present to you; may be I shall dwell on things already familiar; nay, it may well happen that many readers—young and old—fresh from their books—shall know more of matters touched on in our rapid survey than I know myself: never mind that; but remember,—and let me say it once for all—that my aim is not so much to give definite instruction as to put the reader into such ways and starts of thought as shall make him eager to instruct himself.
Early Centuries.
In those dreary early centuries when England was in the throes of its beginnings, and when the Roman eagle—which had always led a half-stifled life amongst British fogs, had gone back to its own eyrie in the South—the old stock historians could and did find little to fasten our regard—save the eternal welter of little wars. Indeed, those who studied fifty years ago will remember that all early British history was excessively meagre and stiff; some of it, I daresay, left yet in the accredited courses of school reading; dreadfully dull—with dates piled on dates, and battles by the page; and other pages of battle peppered with such names as Hengist, or Ethelred and Cerdic and Cuthwulf, or whoever could strike hardest or cut deepest.
But now, thanks to modern inquiry and to such men as Stubbs and Freeman and Wright, and the more entertaining Green—we get new light on those old times. We watch the ribs of that ancient land piling in distincter shape out of the water: we see the downs and the bluffs, and the fordable places in the rivers; we know now just where great wastes of wood stood in the way of our piratical forefathers—the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Angles; these latter either by greater moral weight in them, or by the accident of numbers (which is the more probable), coming to give a name to the new country and language which were a-making together.
We find that those old Romans did leave, besides their long, straight, high-roads, and Roman villas, and store of sepulchral vases, a germ of Roman laws, and a little nucleus of Roman words, traceable in the institutions and—to some slight degree—in the language of to-day.
We see in the later pages of Green through what forests the rivers ran, and can go round about the great Roman-British towns (Roman first and then adopted by Britons) of London[2] and of York; and that other magnificent one of Cirencester (or Sisister as the English say
, with a stout defiance of their alphabet). We can understand how and why the fat meadows of Somersetshire should be coveted by marauders and fought for by Celts; and we behold more clearly and distinctly than ever, under the precise topography of modern investigators, the walls of wood and hills which stayed Saxon pursuit of those Britons who sought shelter in Wales, Cumberland, or the Cornish peninsula.