Under Roman rule Britain as a whole prospered exceedingly. Agriculture and commerce were extended, so that we find the lead-merchants of Derby exporting lead to Italy, the chalk-merchants of Tadcaster exporting chalk, and the corn-merchants of the Rhine provinces importing corn from Britain in large quantities.
But beside the export of lead and chalk and corn, another export of trade was going on—the export of the warlike youth of the country, who went to furnish with men the Roman armies in Spain and Gaul and Germany. Those left at home were forbidden by law to carry arms; so there is small wonder that when the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain Roman towns were sacked and burnt, and Roman civilisation blotted out by hostile invaders. ‘Tragedies can still be guessed at from heaps of ashes and from skeletons of men, women and children found ... in crouching attitudes in hypocausts and other places of concealment; and the human bones frequently discovered at the bottoms of wells ... enable us to see the ruthless savage removing the traces of a murderous raid.’
Petuaria, Praetorium, Derventio—all were sacked and burnt by the hosts of Engle who sailed up the Humber and the Derwent, or landed at Bridlington Bay. Roman houses were generally one-storied buildings roofed with tiles or thatch, and the destruction of a town by fire would be complete. It was also, in most cases, lasting; for the destroyers were men who cared not for a life passed within walls and fortifications. ‘They liked better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak.’ So the Roman cities, towns and camps ‘remained in ruins, to be haunted by the owl and the fox.’
But an exception was made by the invaders in the case of the greatest of the Roman cities. Eboracum, Londinium and Lindum Colonia became the chief centres of life for the tribes that captured them; and thus the Eboracum of the Romans became the Eoferwic[[6]] of the Angles—a dwelling-place in the haunts of the wild boar. Smaller towns were blotted out; and their sites are known to us only by the finding of the family store of coins, or the personal treasures once placed for safety in a little recess in the wall or buried in a vase under the floor—to be overwhelmed with debris, and to remain undiscovered for many centuries.
The hostile tribes who invaded Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries in such numbers as to conquer the whole country from the Isle of Wight to the Firth of Forth, except the mountainous districts of the west, were known as the Engle, the Seaxe and the Iute.[[7]] Angles, Saxons and Jutes these are to us. The Iute landed on the shores of, and established colonies in, Kent and the Isle of Wight, the former of which developed into a kingdom; the Seaxe established three kingdoms distinguished from one another in name by the adjectives South, East, and West; and separate bands of Engle formed the kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.
It is with the last-named of these ‘Seven Kingdoms’ that we are most particularly concerned. The huge kingdom of Northumbria stretched northwards from the Humber to the Forth, and was at different times either ruled by one king or divided into two separate kingdoms—Deira, from the Humber to the Tees, and Bernicia, from the Tees to the Forth.
How complete was the conquest of Britain by these invading tribes is seen in the account written by Bede, the eighth century monk of Jarrow:—
They burned and harried and slew from the sea on the east to the sea on the west, and no one was able to withstand them.... Many of the miserable survivors were captured in waste places and stabbed in heaps. Some because of hunger gave themselves into the hands of their enemies, to be their slaves for ever in return for food and clothing; some departed sorrowfully over the sea; some remained fearfully in their native land, and with heavy hearts lived a life of want in the forests and waste places and on the high cliffs.
The completeness of the conquest may be seen also in the fact that the language of the Britons was replaced by that of the invaders. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes spoke a language entirely different from the Keltic language of the Britons; but except in the Highlands of Scotland, in Wales, and in the Isle of Man—the parts to which the invaders did not penetrate—the language spoken to-day is English and the name of the country itself is Engla-land, the land of the Engle.