Saxons, A.D. 364.
Their ships.
Nor do historians afford much information with regard to the affairs of Britain from the death of Constantius, father of Constantine the Great, until more than fifty years afterwards, when its Roman subjects were seriously harassed by the Welsh on the west, and the Caledonians on the north, who ravaged the frontiers and spread terror throughout the now civilized provinces of Britannia Romana. Nor was this all: while harassed by the descendants of the Celts, the Germanic Saxons invaded England on the east and south, startling the Romans and their subjects by the daring intrepidity with which they skimmed over the roughest seas in “boats of leather,” and, without respect of persons or property, plundered and carried off everything worthy of removal. Besides these frail craft the Saxons, however, possessed more than one description of vessel altogether superior to their leather-covered boats, called by the old historians in Latin, Kiulæ; in Saxon, Ceol, or Ciol; and in English, Keels.[461] Some writers also maintain that they had strong open boats adapted to warfare at sea.
That these German rovers possessed larger vessels than even their war-galleys is ascertained by the fact that, within seventy or eighty years after they first gained a secure footing in Britain, they received a reinforcement of “five thousand men, in seventeen ships,”[462] or at the rate of about three hundred men to a ship, besides provisions, stores, and munitions of war. But of their form, size, or equipment no accounts have been preserved, and it can, therefore, tend to no useful purpose to attempt, as Mr. Strutt has done, the reproduction of the supposed types of the vessels of Canute, as all such drawings are only the creations of fancy.
It may be reasonable, however, to infer that the better class of Saxon vessels were copies of the Roman or British galleys, used by Carausius or Constantius, possibly with some addition, such as higher bulwarks, fitting them the better to resist the stormy and pitching sea of the German Ocean. However slow the progress of improvement may have been among a body of merchants and shipowners, whose property was perpetually exposed to depredation and destruction, there can be no doubt that the princes of those days in Britain and throughout northern Europe availed themselves of all the resources of the time to display their maritime consequence and power to the best advantage. It can, indeed, be hardly questioned that the long and comparatively peaceful intercourse between the seamen of the north and the south must have familiarized the Vikings with such improvements in the construction of shipping as had been worked out by the nations bordering on the Mediterranean; and though, for short and hasty expeditions, the Northmen or the Saxons may have been willing to trust themselves to small or ill-constructed open boats, there is no reason to suppose this would be the case, either when they had heavy and bulky merchandise, or their best and bravest warriors, to convey in safety on long and perilous voyages.
On the invasion of the Celts and of the Teutonic tribes, the inhabitants of Britain were unable to make an adequate defence. Unlike their hardy forefathers, who had needed no aid but their own good right hands, they had become accustomed to look for protection to their Roman masters, and to delegate to others what they ought to have achieved themselves. Nor were the northern tribes their only foes. Besides their new invaders, they had to contend with gangs of Roman soldiers, who, cheated of their pay by their officers, infested the highways as robbers, and extorted provisions from the natives.[463]
State of the Britons when abandoned by the Romans.
It might have been supposed that the Britons, improved in learning, in agriculture, in manufactures, and in the arts and sciences by four centuries of Roman instruction, would have become a great and flourishing people. They had, indeed, natural advantages superior to all their rivals, in the possession of some of the finest harbours in the world, of minerals, and of a soil as fruitful, if not more so than that of any of the countries around them. But while Rome had raised the Britons in the social scale, and imparted to them knowledge of the highest value for the development of their vast natural resources, she had, especially towards the close of her career, greatly weakened them, by the heavy drafts of their best sons for employment in local wars, or to be posted far away as garrisons in distant provinces. It is, therefore, probable that Rome left our forefathers comparatively poorer and, assuredly, in a weaker condition than they were when she usurped the government of their island.
Of the origin of the Saxons, whose aid the Britons are said to have sought after the departure of the Romans, nothing is distinctly known, except that they had, for some time previously, made themselves masters of the territory lying between the Elbe and the Rhine, pushing forwards their conquests or occupation of the country as far as the coasts of Zealand, part of the present kingdom of Holland. Their occupation of England was probably exceedingly gradual, the south and east having been early peopled with these strangers, so that the so-called Saxon conquest was really, therefore, rather the slow result of their increasing numbers than of such a development of military or naval genius as is seen in the later inroads of the Danes or of William the Norman.