In order to realise thoroughly the cause of this darkness and confusion which appear to have settled upon Britain and its affairs after the departure of the Romans, we must consider its real position towards Rome as viewed from thence. During the period of the Roman dominion it resembled a distant colony exposed to the incursions of frontier tribes whom no treaties could bind and no defeats subjugate, requiring a large military force for its protection, the accounts of whose proceedings reached Rome at distant intervals, and only attracted more than a passing attention when a crisis occurred in her affairs, which must have been considered rather as a vexatious interruption in matters of nearer and more engrossing interest than a subject of general attention. When the Roman government was withdrawn, she resembled such a distant colony with all connection severed between her and the home government, abandoned to the incursions of her enemies, and left to protect and rule herself.
How completely such a change would for the time blot out a distant colony from the map of the civilised world may be readily conceived; and when she again emerged in the form of a political state, containing once more the elements of civilisation and of a common interest with the rest of the world, the intermediate period of confused and uncertain knowledge would appear almost analogous to that dark age of barbarian life which precedes the birth of infant states, and on which the dim light of tradition and the lays of a rude people engaged in internecine war alone throw an uncertain ray. So it was with Britain. Deserted almost entirely by the Continental historians, and deprived of the clue which any connection with European events would afford, we are left for the history of this interval to the uncertain guide of tradition; and although it necessarily fails in affording us the means of obtaining a connected and trustworthy history, yet by discriminating between what is tradition or fable and what may fairly be accepted as history, and by combining the indications which traditional accounts derived from different sources afford, with the scattered notices contained in writings contemporary, or nearly so, with the events, we may yet be able to present the salient features of the history of this period with some confidence in their reality, and in something like chronological order.
These sources of information, uncertain as they are, and faint as is the light which they throw upon the history of the country during this interval, yet reveal very distinctly indications that to the rule of the Romans in the island there succeeded a fierce and protracted struggle between the provincial Britons and the various barbarian tribes, to whose assaults they had been exposed for so many years, till it terminated in the settlement of the latter in the country, and the formation of four kingdoms, embracing these several races within definite limits. They tell us also something of those races, and of their character and relation to each other. The contest which succeeded the departure of the Romans was one not merely for the possession of the Roman territory, but for the succession to her dominion in the island. The competing parties consisted, on the one hand, of the provincial Britons who had just emerged from under the Roman rule; and, on the other, of those independent tribes, partly inhabitants of the island and partly piratical adventurers from other regions, who had so frequently ravaged the Roman province, and now endeavoured to snatch the prize from the provincial Britons, and from each other.
The four races in Britain.
The races engaged in this struggle were four—the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons or Angles.[[108]] The two former were indigenous, the two latter foreign settlers.
The Britons.
With regard to the former, so many years of Roman dominion in the island could hardly fail to have produced, in some respects, a deep and lasting effect upon the native population; but it did not leave, as might have been expected from the existence of the Roman province for so long a period, a provincial people speaking the Roman language, and preserving their laws and customs. The tendency of the Britons was to throw off the stamp of Roman provincialism with the civil government against which they had rebelled, and to relapse into their primitive Celtic habits and modes of thought. This arose partly from the character of the Roman civil rule, partly from the different effect produced by it in different parts of the country. The distance of Britain from the seat of government, its fertility, and the uncertainty of the Roman tenure of the island, caused it to be regarded less as a valuable portion of the Empire than as a distant mine from which every temporary advantage ought to be drawn at whatever cost to the natives. The Roman civil rule was harsh and oppressive; the British provinces a field for exaction, from which everything it could be made to yield was extracted and carried off without remorse. The effects, too, of the Roman rule were various. On the provincials of the fertile, accessible, and completely subjugated districts, they were more deep and lasting. To a great extent they lost their nationality and became Roman citizens. With it went also their natural courage, and either the desire or the spirit to resume an independent position, and they became enervated or effeminate. On the inhabitants of the northern and western portions of the province the effect must have been lighter and more ephemeral in its character. They were more in the position of native tribes under a foreign rule than of the civilised inhabitants of a province. They were exposed to the continual incursions of the barbaric tribes beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire; and as they had in a greater degree preserved their peculiar habits and national characteristics, the withdrawal of the Roman army and civil government was more the removal of a restraint which left them at liberty to resort to their old habits and resume their independent existence as best they might. Even upon the barbarian tribes who had remained in hostility to the Roman rule it exercised an indirect influence. It created union among them—the gradual combination of small communities into larger associations under a general name, and the moulding of a warlike barbarian people into a social organisation in advance of what they had been.
But the great legacies of Rome to Britain were the idea of monarchy,[[109]] the centralisation of authority, and the municipal government, the position of the ‘civitas’ or city as the centre of local authority to the surrounding territory. In provincial Britain the local government under the civil staff of the Romans was vested in the cities with their senate or ‘curia,’ the ‘decuriones’[[110]] which composed it, and the magistrates elected by them. It was to them Honorius addressed his letters, and when the Roman civilians were driven out they succeeded to their authority, each city forming the centre of a small territorial rule. Of the provincial Britons we find clear indications of a marked distinction between these two classes: the first consisting of those who considered themselves more peculiarly Romans, and bore the impress of their language and habits, among whom were also to be found the descendants of the Roman soldiers who had become naturalised prior to the termination of the Roman government in Britain, and remained in the island. There were in fact three descriptions of persons who might be termed Romans. There was, first, the Roman army, consisting to a great extent of barbarian auxiliaries, parties of whom remained stationed at the same places during the greater part of their occupation of the island. There was, secondly, the civil government, which, from the time of Constantine, if not from that of Diocletian, had been distinct from the military organisation, and had imposed upon the provinces a numerous and oppressive body of civil officials, principal and subordinate; and there were, thirdly, the descendants of those of the military who had received benefices or grants of land, or had connected themselves by marriage with the natives, and were thus naturalised among them. The Roman troops had been withdrawn by the various usurpers who assumed the purple in the island. The civil government had been expelled by the people, by whom, in common with all the provincials of the Roman Empire, it was detested and reluctantly submitted to; but the third class remained, and naturally became the leaders of those provincials who had become, as it were, Romanised. This class of the provincial Britons would be found mainly in that part of the province longest subjected and most easily accessible to Roman influence, bounded by the Humber and the Severn, and in the eastern and more level portion of the territory between the Humber and the Firths of Forth and Clyde, where the proper frontier of the province existed.
The second great class of the provincial Britons consisted of those who had been later conquered, and, occupying the wilder and more secluded regions of the north and west, retained less of the impress of the Roman provincial rule. These, on the departure of the Romans, fell back more upon a British nationality; and while the former fell an easy prey to the invader, the latter, retaining their British speech in its integrity, and possessing more of the warlike habits of a people inhabiting mountainous and pastoral districts, after the first paralysing effect of the absence of their usual protectors, the Roman troops, had passed away, took part in the struggle which ensued with vigour and animation.
Gildas, the British historian, alludes plainly enough to these two classes when he says that ‘the discomfited people, wandering in the woods, began to feel the effects of a severe famine, which compelled many of them without delay to yield themselves up to their cruel persecutors to obtain subsistence. Others of them, however, lying hid in mountains, caves, and woods, continually sallied out from thence to renew the war, and then it was for the first time they overthrew their enemies who had for so many years been living in their country.’[[111]]