Multi; sed omnes inlachrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longa
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro!”
Whatever periods we assume for the division of the land into Marks, or to what cause soever we attribute the names adopted by the several communities, the method and manner of their dispersion remains a question of some interest. The [Appendix] shows a most surprising distribution of some particular names over several counties[[123]]: but this seems conceivable only in two ways; first, that the inhabitants of a Mark, finding themselves pressed for room at home, migrated to other seats, and established a new community under the old designation; or, secondly, that in the division of the newly conquered soil, men who had belonged to one community upon the continent, found themselves thrown into a state of separation here, either by the caprice of the lots, supposing their immigration simultaneous, or by the natural course of events, supposing one body to have preceded the other. Perhaps too we must admit the possibility of a dispersion arising from the dissolution of ancient confederacies, produced by internal war. On the whole I am disposed to look upon the second hypothesis as applicable to the majority of cases; without presuming altogether to exclude the action of the first and third causes. It is no doubt difficult to imagine that a small troop of wandering strangers should be allowed to traverse a settled country in search of new habitations. Yet, at first, there must have been abundance of land, which conduct and courage might wring from its Keltic owners. Again, how natural on the other hand is it, that in the confusion of conquest, or the dilatory course of gradual occupation, men once united should find their lot cast apart, and themselves divided into distant communities! Nor in this can we recognize anything resembling the solemn planting of a Grecian, far less of a Roman, colony; or suppose that any notion of a common origin survived to nourish feelings of friendship between bodies of men, so established in different lands. Even had such traditions originally prevailed, they must soon have perished, when the Marks coalesced into the Gá or Shire, and several of the latter became included in one kingdom. New interests and duties must then have readily superseded maxims which belonged to an almost obsolete organization.
But in truth, to this question of dispersion and relationship, considered in its widest generality, there is no limit either of place or time: it derives, indeed, some of its charm from the very vagueness which seems to defy the efforts of the historian: and even the conviction that a positive and scientific result is unattainable, does not suffice to repress the anxiety with which we strive to lift the veil of our Isis. The question of every settlement, large or small, ultimately resolves itself into that of the original migrations of mankind. Unless we can bring ourselves to adopt the hypothesis of autochthonous populations,—an hypothesis whose vagueness is not less than attaches to a system of gradual, but untraced, advances,—we must fall back from point to point, until we reach one starting-place and one origin. Every family that squats upon the waste, assumes the existence of two families from which it sprang: every household, comprising a man and woman, if it is to be fruitful and continue, presupposes two such households; each of these continues to represent two more, in a geometrical progression, whose enormous sum and final result are lost in the night of ages. The solitary who wanders away into the uncultivated waste, and there by degrees rears a family, a tribe and a state, takes with him the traditions, the dispositions, the knowledge and the ideas, which he had derived from others, in turn equally indebted to their predecessors. This state of society, if society it can be called, is rarely exhibited to our observation. The backwoodsman in America, or the settler in an Australian bush, may furnish some means of judging such a form of civilization; and the traditions of Norway and Iceland dimly record a similar process: but the solitary labourer, whose constant warfare with an exulting and exuberant nature does little more than assure him an independent existence, has no time to describe the course and the result of his toils: and the progress of the modern settler is recorded less by himself, than by a civilized society, whose offset he is; which watches his fortunes with interest and judges them with intelligence; which finds in his career the solution of problems that distract itself, and never forgets that he yet shares in the cultivation he has left behind him.
Still the manner in which such solitary households gradually spread over and occupy a country, must be nearly the same in all places, where they exist at all. The family increases in number; the arable is extended to provide food; the pasture is pushed further and further as the cattle multiply, or as the grasslands become less productive. Along the banks of the river which may have attracted the feelings or the avarice of the wanderer, which may have guided his steps in the untracked wilderness, or supplied the road by which he journeyed, the footsteps of civilization move upward: till, reaching the rising ground from which the streams descend on either side, the vanguards of two parties meet, and the watershed becomes their boundary, and the place of meeting for religious or political purposes. Meantime, the ford, the mill, the bridge have become the nucleus of a village, and the blessings of mutual intercourse and family bonds have converted the squatters’ settlement into a centre of wealth and happiness. And in like manner is it, where a clearing in the forest, near a spring or well[[124]],—divine, for its uses to man,—has been made; and where, by slow degrees, the separated families discover each other, and find that it is not good for man to be alone.
This description, however, will not strictly apply to numerous or extensive cases of settlement, although some analogy may be found, if we substitute a tribe for the family. Continental Germany has no tradition of such a process; and we may not unjustly believe the records of such in Scandinavia to have arisen from the wanderings of unquiet spirits, impatient of control or rivalry, of criminals shrinking from the consequences of their guilt, or of descendants dreading the blood-feud inherited from ruder progenitors. But although systematic and religious colonization, like that of Greece, cannot be assumed to have prevailed, we may safely assert that it was carried on far more regularly, and upon more strict principles than are compatible with capricious and individual settlement[[125]]. Tradition here and there throws light upon the causes by which bodies of men were impelled to leave their ancient habitations, and seek new seats in more fruitful or peaceful districts. The emigration represented by Hengest has been attributed to a famine at home, and even the grave authority of history has countenanced the belief that his keels were driven into exile: thus far we may assume his adventure to have been made with the participation, if not by the authority, of the parent state.
In general we may admit the division of a conquered country, such as Britain was, to have been conducted upon settled principles, derived from the actual position of the conquerors. As an army they had obtained possession, and as an army they distributed the booty which rewarded their valour. That they nevertheless continued to occupy the land as families or cognationes, resulted from the method of their enrolment in the field itself, where each kindred was drawn up under an officer of its own lineage and appointment, and the several members of the family served together. But such a distribution of the land as should content the various small communities that made up the whole force, could only be ensured by the joint authority of the leaders, the concurrence of the families themselves, and the possession of a sufficient space for their extension, undisturbed by the claims of former occupants, and suited to the wants of its new masters. What difficulties, what jealousies preceded the adjustment of all claims among the conquerors, we cannot hope to learn, or by what means these were met and reconciled: but the divisions themselves, so many of whose names I have collected, prove that, in some way or other, the problem was successfully solved.
On the natural clearings in the forest, or on spots prepared by man for his own uses; in valleys, bounded by gentle acclivities which poured down fertilizing streams; or on plains which here and there rose, clothed with verdure, above surrounding marshes; slowly and step by step, the warlike colonists adopted the habits and developed the character of peaceful agriculturists. The towns which had been spared in the first rush of war, gradually became deserted, and slowly crumbled to the soil, beneath which their ruins are yet found from time to time, or upon which shapeless masses yet remain, to mark the sites of a civilization, whose bases were not laid deep enough for eternity. All over England there soon existed a network of communities, the principle of whose being was separation, as regarded each other: the most intimate union, as respected the individual members of each. Agricultural, not commercial, dispersed, not centralized, content within their own limits and little given to wandering, they relinquished in a great degree the habits and feelings which had united them as military adventurers; and the spirit which had achieved the conquest of an empire, was now satisfied with the care of maintaining inviolate a little peaceful plot, sufficient for the cultivation of a few simple households.