I have said that the English were well received at the court of the great Emperor. You may take that to mean that the English were by no means, at this far-away date, shut up in their own island. They often went to and from the Continent and even to Rome; and Roman emissaries, priests and bishops, were constantly coming to England.
To get a true picture in your minds of the country, both in England and in other parts of Europe, it is almost necessary first to dismiss from your minds the picture as you know it to-day. Whereas, now, you see for the most part, as you travel by train or motor, cleared land, open fields, and here and there woodland, you have to imagine a land at that time universally covered by wood, with only here and there clearances made by man. Along the tops of the downs, however, exposed to the high winds, there would be very little growth of trees. The woodland would be full of game and of wild creatures. There would be deer, and wolves preying on the deer.
You must imagine a population extraordinarily less numerous than it is now. Even in 1087, when Domesday Book, which contained a "census" of all England, was made, the population is given at 1,500,000. For the most part we may suppose the people living rather after the manner in which the Gothic tribes lived in their own country—in clearances, or what we might call villages, in the midst of the wild wood and in the river valleys. But there would be some towns, larger villages gradually growing, and these towns you would probably find beginning to be surrounded by a protecting wall of raised earth and palings with gates that were shut at nightfall. Generally the houses, both in the villages and in the towns, would be of timber and clay, built as I will shortly describe; but after a while the churches and the great men's houses, and the fortified castles would be of stone. There is what we call Saxon stonework still to be seen both in England and in other parts of Europe.
Now through this green wood, which generally covered our England, there would be roads and tracks. All the travelling by land would be on foot or on horseback. The use of wheels for vehicles was known even to the Britons before the coming of the English, for they had their war-chariots; but even where the Romans had made their fine roads it is not likely that, after all the years since the Romans left the island, these roads would not have fallen into such disrepair that no wheeled thing could go along them far without sticking in the mud.
Modes of travel
For another fact, that you have to realise about the country of that day, is that it was not only far more wooded than it is now: it was also far more marshy. The rivers ran more broadly, their banks were wider. All the neighbourhood of Westminster, for instance, was a swamp, and the Thames, because it was so wide, was far less deep and it was fordable there. Men and horses could walk through it, perhaps on some stones thrown into the bed, and certainly it must have been far less deep and far more wide than it is now.
Because of this marshiness of the lower grounds, the roads by which people travelled went as much as possible along the upper, the harder and drier, ground, sometimes following a line near the top of the downs. The tracks or byways from the woodland and valley villages rose up out of the lowland as quickly as the ground would allow and went up to join the older roads along the downs. But, in spite of all that, you must realise that the rivers were really the great means of communication. They were the chief roads and highways; and the proof of that is that it is always low down, by a river, that all the old towns and the big church establishments and buildings were made. There are Canterbury, London, Winchester, Oxford, Paris, Rouen and very many more that you will think of. Not a river of any size that did not have a town springing up on its banks, and not a town of any size springing up anywhere except on a river's bank.
And the way in which the English and other Gothic people formed their homes and lived their lives appears to have been very different from the way of life of the older Celts. We have seen that the Anglo-Saxons, when they came to England, established themselves in the river valleys and in the woodland country; but there is evidence that those earliest inhabitants of whom we know anything, the Celts, who were here before the Romans, lived more on the upper lands, on the Downs. This is shown by the relics which the plough and the spade discover for us, on these upper levels, and also by those extraordinary large stone rings of which the most famous is that at Stonehenge, although it is certain that only a few hundred years ago the stones at Avebury near Marlborough must have encircled a very much larger area. Most of the Avebury stones have been broken up now by the farmers to make roads and houses.
Lines of travel