At this moment, when every province of the West was subject to disturbance and to the over-running of barbarian bands, small but destructive, Britain particularly suffered. Scotch, Irish and German barbarians looted her on all sides.
These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as auxiliaries in the Roman fashion, may already have been settled in places upon the eastern coast, their various half-German dialects may have already been common upon those coasts; but at any rate, after the breakdown of the Roman order, detached communities under little local chiefs arose. The towns were not destroyed. Neither the slaves, nor, for that matter, the greater part of the free population fell. But wealth declined rapidly in the chaos as it did throughout Western Europe. And side by side with this ruin came the replacing of the Roman official language by a welter of Celtic and of half-German dialects in a mass of little courts. The new official Roman religion—certainly at the moment of the breakdown the religion of a small minority—almost or wholly disappeared in the Eastern pirate settlements. The Roman language similarly disappeared in the many small principalities of the western part of the island; they reverted to their original Celtic dialects. There was no boundary between the hotchpotch of little German-speaking territories on the East and the little Celtic territories on the West. There was no more than a vague common feeling of West against East or East against West; all fought indiscriminately among themselves.
After a time which could be covered by two long lives, during which decline had been very rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the East throughout the Island, the full influence of civilization returned, with the landing in 597 of St. Augustine and his missionaries sent by the Pope.
But the little Pirate courts of the East happened to have settled on coasts which occupied the gateway into the Island; it was thus through them that civilization had been cut off, and it was through them that civilization came back. On this account:
(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce under the united discipline of the Church.
(2) The united British civilization so forming was able to advance gradually westward across the island.
(3) Though the institutions of Europe were much the same wherever Roman civilization had existed and had declined, though the councils of magnates surrounding the King, the assemblies of armed men, the division of land and people into “hundreds” and the rest of it were common to Europe, these things were given, over a wider and wider area of Britain, Eastern, half-German names because it was through the courts of the Eastern kinglets that civilization had returned. The kinglets of the East, as civilization grew, were continually fed from the Continent, strengthened with ideas, institutions, arts, and the discipline of the Church. Thus did they politically become more and more powerful, until the whole island, except the Cornish peninsula, Wales and the Northwestern mountains, was more or less administered by the courts which had their roots in the eastern coasts and rivers, and which spoke dialects cognate to those beyond the North Sea, while the West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed in political power and saw its Celtic dialects shrink in area.
By the time that this old Roman province of Britain re-arises as an ordered Christian land in the eighth century, its records are kept not only in Latin but in the Court “Anglo-Saxon” dialects: by far the most important being that of Winchester. Many place names, and the general speech of its inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a superficial but a very vivid change, is the chief outward change in the slow transformation that has been going on in Britain for three hundred years (450-500 to 750-800).
Britain is reconquered for civilization and that easily; it is again an established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound Europe together even more firmly than the old central government of Rome had bound it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom England was to remain for eight hundred years.