The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician

by Edwin Lester Arnold

Saddled thus with the weight of luxurious conquerors who had lost nearly every art but that of extortion, miserable at home, and devastated from abroad, who can wonder that the British longed to throw off the Roman yoke and breathe the fresher air of a wholesome life again? And as the shadow of the Imperial wings was withdrawn from them their hopes ripened; they thought they were strong and ruleworthy. Fatal mistake! I saw it bud, and I saw it bitterly fruitful!

If you turn back the pages of history you will find these hinds did indeed make a stand for a moment, and when Honorius had withdrawn his last legionaries, and given the islanders their liberty, for a few brief years there was a shepherd government here—the British ruled again in Britain. Then came the next strong tide of Northern invasion, and another conquest.

I well remember how, in the throes of the first great change that heralded a new era in Britain, the herdsmen and serfs were crushed between waning Roman terrors, such as Electra wielded, and the growing horrors of the Northmen.

Of these latter I saw something. On one occasion when the storm was brewing, I was away down in the coast provinces hunting wolves, and thus by chance fell in with a “sea king’s” foray and a British reprisal. On that occasion the spoilers were spoiled, and we taught the Northern ravishers a lesson which, had they been more united so that such a blow might have been better felt by the whole, would have damped their ardor for a long time. As it was, to rout and destroy their scattered parties was but like mopping up the advancing tide of those salt waves that brought them on us.

Those down there by the Kentish shore had been unmolested for some years; they had lived at their leisure, had got their harvests in, had rebuilt their villages out in the open, and set up forges, and hammered spearheads and bosses, rings for the women, of silver and brass, and chains and furniture for their horses, of gold; shearing their flocks, and living as though such things as Norsemen were not—when one day the infliction came upon them again.

It was a gusty morning in early summer—I remember it well—and most of the men were from the villages, hunting, when away toward the coast went up to the brightening sky a thin curl of smoke, followed by another and another. The sight was understood only too well. Line after line crept up in the silence of the morning over the green tree tops and against the gray of the sea, while groups of black figures (flying villagers we knew them to be) went now and then over the sky-line of the wolds into the security of the valleys to right and left. As the wail went up from the huts where I rested, a mounted chief, his toes in the iron rings of his stirrups, and his wolf skins flying from his bare shoulders, came pounding through the woods with the bad news the raiders were close behind.

Rapid packing was a great feminine accomplishment in those days, and, while the women swept their children and more portable valuables into their clothes and disappeared into the forest, we sent the quickest-footed youths that were with us to call back the hunters, and made our first stand there round the huts and mounds of the old village of Caen Edron.

And we kept its thatch and chattels inviolate, for, by this time, the countryside was all in arms, and, as the sea was far behind them, the despoilers but showed themselves on the fringe of the open, exchanged a javelin or two, and turned.

Hot on their track that morning of vengeance we went after them; over the scrubby open ground and down through the tangles of oak and hazel. We pressed them back past the charred and smoking remnants of the villages they had burned, back by the streams that still ran streaky in quiet places with blood, back down the red path of ruin and savagery they had trodden, back by the cruel finger-posts of dead women, back by the halting places of the ravishers—ever drawing new recruits and courage, till we outnumbered them by six to one—and thus we trampled that day on the heels of those laden pirates from the valley-head down to the shore.

It was a time of vengeance, and our women and children crowded, singing and screaming, after us, to kill and torture the wounded. Every now and then those surly spoilers turned, and we fled before them as the dogs fly from a big boar who goes to bay; but each time we came on again, and their standing places by the coverts and under the lichened rocks were littered with dead, and all bestrewn amid the ferns in the pink morning light was the glittering spoil they disgorged. Truly that was an hour of victory, and the Britons were drunk with success. They followed like starving wolves after a herd of deer, leaping from rock to rock, crowding every point of vantage, and running and yelling through the underwood until surely the Northmen must have thought the place in possession of a legion of devils.