■m DHInHSiS Mm \m rain Bill mMM m Wm\ m ID nil mm m ■ »j mm \1m ISiiiliHlffiili Iff HH 111 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A., LL.D. u HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE" " SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE" ETC. tBitf) Jttaps NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1882 ID A » 52 .Gr? Bj Trtvasftr JUN £ 1*1/ PREFACE. The present work is only a partial realization of an old-standing project of mine, for it is now some ten or twelve years since I made collections for, and actually began, a history of England up to the Nor- man Conquest. This work, however, was interrupt- ed by the preparation of my Short History, and has since been further delayed by my revision and ex- pansion of that work ; and, now that my hands are free, the state of my health forbids my carrying out this earlier plan in its full extent. I have thought it better, therefore, to gather up. and complete what I could of the history of the earlier times up to the union of England under Ecgberht; and this the more because these years form a distinct period in our national history whose interest and importance have, I think, still to be fully recognized. They form, in fact, the period of the Making of England — the age during which our fathers conquered and settled over the soil of Britain, and in which their political and social life took the form which it still retains. The centuries of administrative organization which v i PREFACE. stretch from Ecgberht to Edward the First, the age of full national development which extends from Ed- ward's day to our own, only become fully intelligible to us when we have fully grasped this age of nation- al formation. I cannot but feel, therefore, that it is no slight misfortune that such a period should re- main comparatively unknown ; and that its strug- gles, which were in reality the birth-throes of our na- tional life, should be still to most Englishmen, as they were to Milton, mere battles of kites and of crows. Whether I have succeeded in setting these struggles in a truer and a more interesting light, my readers must decide. The remoteness of the events, the comparative paucity of historical materials, no doubt make such an undertaking at the best a haz- ardous one ; and one of the wisest of my friends, who is, at the same time, the greatest living authority on our early history, warned me at the outset against the attempt to construct a living portraiture of times which so many previous historians, themselves men of learning and ability, had left dead. Perhaps it is my own vivid interest in the subject which has en- couraged me, in spite of such a warning, to attempt to convey its interest to others. In doing so, how- ever, I have largely availed myself of some resources which have been hitherto, I think, unduly neglected. Archaeological researches on the sites of villas and towns, or along the line of road or dyke, often fur- nish us with evidence even more trustworthy than that of written chronicle; while the ground itself, PREFACE. Vll where we can read the information it affords, is, whether in the history of the Conquest or of the Set- tlement of Britain, the fullest and the most certain of documents. Physical geography has still its part to play in the written record of that human history to which it gives so much of its shape and form ; and in the present work I have striven, however imper- fectly, to avail myself of its aid. I may add, in explanation of the reappearance of a few passages, relating principally to ecclesiastical matters, which my readers may have seen before, that where I had little or nothing to add or to change I have preferred to insert a passage from previous work, with the requisite corrections and references, to the affectation of rewriting such a pas- sage for the mere sake of giving it an air of novelty. John Richard Green. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. BRITAIN AND ITS FOES. A.D. • PAGE Britain Fortunate in .the Moment of its Conquest 1,2 Rapidity of its Organization and Development 2, 3 Shown in its Roads and its Towns 3, 4 But this Civilization of Little Depth 5 Britain indeed little more than a Military Colony 6 Its Civilization Hindered by the Physical Character of the Country . 7, 8 Its Downs ... . . 9 Its Waste and Fen ,,,,....... 10 Its Woodlands , , , , ■ . 1 1 Effect of this on the Provincials .12 Probable Severances between the Romanized and Un-Romanized Pro- vincials . . . . . . . . " . . • 13 This Heightened by Misgovernment and Disaffection .... 14 The Severance perhaps Accounts for the Success of the Pictish Inroads 14, 15 While Picts Attack by Land, Scots and Saxons Attack by Sea . . 15 The Pirate-boats of the Saxons 16 Letter of Sidonius Describing their Piracy 16,17 , Their Work mainly Slave-hunting . . . . . . .17 Effect of their Presence in the Channel . ... . . , ... 18,19 Creation of the Saxon Shore 19, 20 Fortresses of the Saxon Shore . 20 The Roman Troops Strong Enough to Guard Britain to the Last . . 21 Withdrawal of "the Roman Troops ' 21,22 The Province Defends itself for Thirty Years . . . . 23, 24 But at Last Strives to Divide its Foes by Calling in Pirates against the Picts '. . . . . ; : . . ... 24, 25 CHAPTER I. THE CONQUEST OF THE SAXON SHORE. 449-r. 500. 449. Three Jutish Keels Land in Thanet 26 Their Landing-place at Ebbsfleet . . .' . . ". .28 Their Encampment in Thanet 29 The Jutes Aid the Britons ... . . . . . • 31 x CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE Quarrel between Jutes and Britons 31 Obstacles in the Way of Jutish Attack . 32 Their Sack of Durovernum 33 March on the Medvvay Valley 33 455. Battle of Aylesford 34 457. Battle of the Cray Drives Britons to London 35 Revolution in Britain under Aurelius Ambrosianus .... 36 Aurelius Drives Back the Jutes into Thanet 36 The Fortress ofRichborough 36 465. The Final Overthrow of*the Britons at Wipped's-fieet .... 37 465-473. Conquest of the Rest of the Caint 37,38 The Jutes Forced to Halt by Physical Obstacles 38 Descents of the Saxons on either Flank of the Caint . . . 38,39 477. Saxon War-bands under JEUa. Land at Selsea 40 477-491. The Coast slowly Won by these South Sexe 41 491. Siege of Anderida 41 Roman Life here as Shown in Villa at Bignor ..... 43 Descents of Saxons in District North of the Thames .... 44 Fall of Camulodunum 45 Character of the Settlement of these East Sexe 45 Barriers which Prevent their Advance into the Island .... 47 4f;0. Landing of the Engle . -47 Their German Home-land .48 Their Conquest of East Anglia 49 Settlement of the North-folk and South-folk 50 Probably Refrained from Attacking Central Britain . . . 51 Their Settlement Completes the Conquest of the Saxon Shore . . 52 CHAPTER II. CONQUESTS OF THE ENGLE. c. 500-r. 570. The Bulk of Britain still Guarded by Strong Natural Barriers . 53, 54 The Engle Stretch Northward along the Coast 54 e. 500. They Conquer the District about Lindum 55 Settlement of the Lindiswara 56 Other Engle Seize Holderness 56 And Establish a Kingdom of the Deirans in the Wolds and District round 58 Eboracum 58, 59 500-520. Fall of Eboracum 60 Conquest of the Plain of the Ouse , .61 Conquest of Eastern and Western Yorkshire ..... 62, 63 Flight of the Britons Shown in Remains at Settle 64 Attack of the Engle still further North . . . . . . .65 The Roman Wall .66 Little Permanent Change Wrought by Pictish Inroads . . . 67, 68 500-547. Conquest and Settlement of the Engle in the Basin of the Tweed . 68, 69 CONTENTS. xi A.D. PAGE 547. Ida Sets Up the Kingdom of the Bernicians at Bamborough . . . 69 iil-c. 580. Slow Advance of these Bernicians from the Coast 70 The Engle in the Valley of the Trent 72 Physical Character of the Trent Valley 7 2 Descent of the Engle from Lindum 73 The Snottingas Settle on the Edge of Sherwood . . . . -75 The Bulk of the Engle Follow the Fosse Road to the Valley of the Soar 76 550. Fall of Ratse and Settlement of the Middle Engle 76 Meanwhile the Gyrwas Break in on the Towns around the Wash . . 77 Their Two Tribes, the North and South Gyrwas .... 78, 79 The Engle Attack our Northamptonshire 79 Its Physical Character at this Time 80 Settlement of the South Engle 80 c. 560. Advance of the West Engle 81 The Pec-ssetan Settle in our Derbyshire ( 81 The Rest of the West Engle in our Staffordshire 82 The West Engle become Known as Mercians, or Men of the March . 82 CHAPTER III. CONQUESTS OF THE SAXONS, c. 500-577. Character of British Coast to the Westward of Sussex ....?'' The Estuary of the Southampton Water Leads up to Gwent ... 84 495-514. Attempts of Saxons Known as Gewissas to Penetrate by this Estuary . 84 519. Conquest of the Gwent in Battle of Charford 85 519. Cerdic and Cynric become Kings of the West Saxons .... 85 520. Gewissas Repulsed by Britons at Mount Badon 86 530. Conquest of the Isle of Wight, and Settlement of Jutes in it . . .87 520-552. Long Pause in West-Saxon Advance . 87 Physical Barriers that Arrested them 88 552. Cynric again Advances to the West 88 552. Fall of Sorbiodunum 89 552-556. Settlement of the Wil-sastan 90 556. Victory of the West Saxons at Barbury Hill Makes them Masters of the Marlborough Downs j ... 91 Conquest of our Berkshire 92 Britain now Open to the West Saxons 93 They are Able to Advance along the Upper Thames .... 93 Obstacles which had till now Prevented the English Advance from the Mouth of the Thames 94 The Water-way Blocked by the Fortress of London .... 95 Original Character of the Ground about London .... 95~97 London not a British Town 97 Its Site the Centre of a Vast Solitude. 98 Its Rapid Growth under the Romans 99, 100 Its Importance as the Centre of their Road System . . . .101 Stages of its Growth 101,102 x [[ CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE . Its Later Greatness 102 .It long Resists Successfully the East Saxons and the Jutes of Kent . 103 Advance of the East Saxons on our Hertfordshire 104 540-560. Fall of Verulamium . . - 105 560-568. Fall of London • . . 105,106 Settlement of the Middle Saxons . 106 Growth of Kent since its Conquest 107, 108 568. The Fall of London Sets the Jutes Free to Advance to the West . . 109 Meanwhile the West Saxons are Advancing on the Same Tract from the West 109 Their Road Open to them by the Fall of Calleva . . . . 110,111 Their Advance along the Thames Valley 112 568. They Meet and Defeat the Jutes at Wimbledon . . . . . 113 Settlement of the West Saxons in our Surrey 114 The District of the Four Towns 114-116 The Icknield Way Guides the West Saxons to it . . . . . 117 They Cross the Thames at Wallingford 119 571. Cufhwulf's Victory at Bedford 119 West Saxons Occupy the District of the Four Towns .... 120 The Close of their Advance to the North probably Due to the Presence of the Engle in Mid-Britain 121 577. They Attack the Severn Valley 122 League of the Three Towns against them . . . . . . 123 577. Their Victory at Deorham 124 Their Settlement as the Hwiccas along the Lower Severn, on the Cots- wolds, and by the Avon 125, 126 CHAPTER IV. THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CONQUERORS. At the Battle of Deorham Half Britain has become English . . . 127 Henceforth the Work of the English is that of Settlement rather than Conquest 127, 128 Character of the Settlement Determined by that of the Conquest . . 128 Characteristics of the Conquest— . (1) The Weakness of the Attack 128 (2) Stubbornness of the Defence ...... 129 (3) Nature of the Conquered Country 129 Hence the Slowness of the Conquest and the Driving-off of the Con- quered People 130 The Britons, not Slaughtered, but Driven Off . . . . . .131 Proofs of this Displacement — (1) The New Inhabitants Know themselves only as English- men 133 (2) The Unconquered Britons Know them only as Strangers . 133 (3) Evidence of Local and Personal Names . . . . 134 (4) Evidence of Language ... . . . . . 135 CONTENTS. x iii PAtSE . (5) Evidence of Changed Institutions " . . . . 136 = (6) Evidence Drawn from Destruction of Towns . . . 137 (7) Evidence Drawn from the Change of Religion . . 138,139 But Roman Britain still Influenced the New England — (1) It Gave it its Limits . . . . . . . 140 . (2) It Determined the Bounds of Kingdoms and Tribes . 141, 142 , (3) It Influenced the Social Settlement ... . . . 142 But in all Other Ways Roman Life Disappeared . . . . . 143 The Change Shown in the Conquest of Kent . . ... 143 . (1) The Caintin Roman Times . . . .... 144 ,(2) The Caint after the Jutish Conquest . . . . 145,146 The New English Society that Sprang up on this Ruin . . . 147, 148 The Slowness of the Conquest Allows the Transfer of the Whole Eng- lish, Life . 149 The Settlement that of.Numerous Separate Folks . . . . . 151 Traces of such Folks in Kent . . . . . . . . . ; . r5 r But Early Fusion s of such Fglks in Three Great Kingdoms . . 152,153 And Recognition by the Three Kingdoms of a National Unity . <, 153 Character of.the English Civilization ........ . . . 154 (1) The Saxons Long in Contact with Rome . ... . 154 (2) Their Early Art 155 . (3) Their Literature ....... ^ ., . . . 156^157 . (4) Their Moral Temper . . . . . . . 158, 159 (5) .Their Religion . . . . . . . 160, 161 (6) Its Weak Hold on the Settlers 162, 163 (7) Their Military Life 164, 165 The Folk itself. Its Shape Drawn from War .... 166, 167 (1) The Host . 167 (2) The Military Organization Shapes the Civil Organization . 169 (3) The Hundred-moot and Folk-moot .... 170, 171 (4) The King. 172 (5) Eorl and Ceorl . . . 173 . (6) TheThegn . ....... i . 174 The English Township . , 175, 176 . (1) .Its Boundaries 177,178 . (2) .The Freeman's Home 178 . (3) The Farm and its Labor 180, 181 . (4) J The 1 BondofttieKin . . . . , . . .^182,183 . (5) .The. Common Holding of Land . . . . .i '. 184 . (6). The.Unfr.ee. ... 185 (7) The Slave . . . . . . . . . ; . 186 ; (8) The Tun-moot . 187, 188 CHAPTER V. THE STRIFE OF THE CONQUERORS. 577-617. Change of Relations between Conquerors and Conquered . .' . 189 Early Severance "between the Two Races - . r ■ -.......'. . . '.\ .190 x i v CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE Shown in the Story of Beino . 190,191 This Passes Away with the Battle of Deorham 192 The Britons no longer Driven from the Soil 192 Their Increasing Numbers as the Conquest Spreads Westward . . 193 Change, too, in Relations of the Conquerors themselves . . 193, 194 They Divide into Greater and Lesser Powers 195 After-history a Strife of the Greater Powers for Supremacy . . . 195 The West Saxons under Ceawlin the Leading English Power . 195, 196 583. Ceawlin's March on the Upper Severn Valley 198 Storm of Uriconium 199 Ceawlin Defeated at Faddiley . 200 Rising of the Hwiccas Throws Ceawlin Back on the Older Wessex . 201 591. Ceawlin Defeated at Wanborough 202 Internal Troubles of the West Saxons 202 iEthelberht of Kent Seizes the Opportunity 203 r. 584-589. His Marriage with Bertha 204 Canterbury 205 Before 597. yEthelberht's Supremacy 206 Its Limits 207 Before 588. War between Bernicians and Deirans 208 585-588. Gregory and the English Slaves at Rome 210 588. Death of JElla. 211 588. Conquest of Deira by the Bernician King ^Ethelric . . . .211 The Union of the Two Kingdoms in Northumbria 211 The Three Great Kingdoms fairly Established 212 593. yEthelfrith Succeeds iEthelric as King of Northumbria . . . . 212 597. Roman Mission to the English under Augustine 213 iEthelberht Receives the Missionaries in Thanet 213 They Settle at Canterbury 214 Future Issues of their Coming 215 597. Conversion of iEthelberht and his People 216 601. Gregory's Plan for the Ecclesiastical Organization of Britain . . 216, 217 Augustine's Interview with the Welsh Clergy 217 Condition of the Britons at this Time 218 The Stubbornness of their Resistance 218,219 Disorganization of What Remained of Britain .... 219,220 Rejection of Augustine by the British Clergy 221 Consolidation of the British States 222 Its Result a Revival of the British Strength 223 Alliance of Northern Britons with the Scots 224 603. Their Force Crushed by ^Ethelfrith in the Battle of Daegsastan . . 225 Northumbrian Supremacy Established over Northern Britons . 225, 226 iEthelberht at last Resolves to Carry Out Gregory's Scheme . 226, 227 604. Establishment of Bishop at Rochester 228 604. Bishop Set over the East Saxons at London . . . . . 228, 229 Raedwald, King of East Anglians, Baptized at ^Ethelberht's Court . 229 The East Anglians Reject Christianity 230 ?607. Fall of ^Ethelberht's Supremacy 230 CONTENTS. XV A.D. . PAGE Rsedwald Establishes a Supremacy over Mid-Britain .... 230 This Revolution Aided by the Troubles of the West Saxons . . 231 And by ^Ethelfrith's Embarrassments with the House of JEUa. . . 232 The House of Mlla. Finds Shelter among the Welsh, who are Attacked by ^Ethelfrith 232 Position and Importance of Chester in Roman Times .... 233 613. iEthelfrith's Victory at Chester 234,235 Results of this Battle on the Britons and on Northumbria . . . 236 yEfhelfrith Drawn to the South by the Weakness of Wessex and Fall of Kent 238 616. The East Saxons Revolt from Kent at ^Ethelberht's Death . . . 238 iEthelfrith Brought into Collision with Raedwald by the House of ^Ella 239 617. Eadwine Seeks Shelter in East Anglia 240 Hesitations of Rasdwald 241 Eadwine and the Stranger 242 617. iEthelfrith Defeated by Rasdwald at the Idle 243,244 CHAPTER VI. THE NORTHUMBRIAN SUPREMACY. 617-659. 1 7-633. Eadwine Established as King of Northumbria 245 The Kingdom of Elmet ......... 246, 247 Eadwine's Conquest of Elmet 249 His Power at Sea, and Conquests of Anglesea and Man .... 250 He Establishes his Supremacy over Mid-Britain 251 626. His Victory over the West Saxons 251 Eadwine Supreme over All the English save Kent 252 Character of his Rule over Northumbria 252 He is Pressed by his Kentish Wife to Become Christian . . . 255 627. The Northumbrian Witan Accept Christianity .... 255, 256 The New Faith Rejected in East Anglia 257 Rising of the Mercians 258 Penda King of the Mercians . . 258 Penda Becomes Supreme over Mid-Britain 259 His Battle with the West Saxons at Cirencester . . . . . 259 Probable Annexation of the Hwiccan Country 260 Strife between Penda and Eadwine for East Anglia . . ■ . . 260 Alliance of Penda with Cadwallon 261 The Hatfield Fen 262 633. Eadwine Defeated and Slain by Penda at Hatfield 264 Northumbria Broken Up into its Two Kingdoms 264 Penda Conquers East Anglia 265 Oswald King of the Bernicians . . 266 Battle of the Heaven-field 268 From this Time the Struggle of the Welsh is a Mere Struggle of Self- Defence 268 635. Oswald Calls for Missionaries from Ireland 269 xv i CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE Influence of its Physical Characteristics on the History of Ireland . 269 Early Ireland a Huge Grazing-ground . 270 Its Primitive Institutions -. . .271 Its Contrast with the Rest of Europe 272,273 Story of Patrick . . ... . . . . . . , . 274 The Conversion of Ireland 275 The Irish Church Moulded by the Social Condition of Ireland . 276, 277 Influence of the Celtic Temper on Irish Christianity .... 278 Its Poetic and Romantic Temper . . ...... . . . 279 The Foreign Missions of the Irish Church .. ., • . . . 280 635. Aidan Summoned by Oswald to Lindisfarne 281 The Irish Missionaries in Northumbria . . . . . . 281, 282 Oswald Re-establishes the Northumbrian Supremacy . . . 283, 284 642. Oswald Slain by Penda at. the Maserfeld , 286 Northumbria again Broken Up. 287 642-670. Oswiu King of the Bernicians . ,.,-.. ... . . -.287 Penda Ravages Bernicia 287 651. Oswiu Reconquers Deira 288 Final Restoration of Northumbria 289 652. Conversion of Penda's Son Peada . . . . . . . 290 Conversion of the East Saxons . 291 654. Penda Reconquers East Anglia . . . .... . . 292 Penda Attacks Oswiu 293 655.. Penda Defeated and Slain at the Winwaed . . . . . . 293 Wreck of the Mercian State . . . 294, 295 Oswiu Supreme, over all the English 296 659. Revolt of the Mercians under Wulfhere 296-298 Abandonment by Northumbria of her Effort after Supremacy . 298, 299 . (Note on the Impcrium of the Early Kings) ..... 298-300 CHAPTER VII. THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOMS. 659-690. With the Failure of Northumbria National Union Seems Impossible . 301 Entry of a New Element into English Life in the Church . . . 361 All the English States save Sussex now Christian . . . .. . 302 The Organizing Force of Roman Christianity . . . '. . 302 But the Dominant Christianity in Britain now Irish .... 303 Activity of the Irish Church in the North after the Winwasd . 1 . 304 651-676. The Mission Work of Cuthbert . 304-308 The Irish Church Devoid of Organizing Power . . ... . 308 The Success would have Brought About a Religious Schism in Britain . t 308, 309 The Roman Party in Northumbria •. Benedict Biscop its Head . Still more Energetic Action of Wilfrid . 664. The Irish Party Defeated at the Synod of Wr . 310 ... .312 . . . . .312 itby . .",..'. ; 1 313 CONTENTS. xv ii PAGE The Synod Averted the Religious Isolation, and Secured the Religious Oneness of England . • 3 X 4 Importance of the Primacy in the Reunited Church . . . 315, 316 Theodore, Named Primate by the Pope, Lands in Britain . . .317 Mercia now the Most Active English State 318 Wulf here King of the Mercians .318 Re-establishes the Mercian Supremacy in Mid-Britain . . 318,319 661. Extends it over Essex, Surrey, and Sussex ...... 319 39-672. Theodore Journeys over All England . 321 He is Everywhere Received as Primate 321 His First Ordering of the English Dioceses 322 673. Calls a Council at Hertford 323 Influence of these Councils on National Development . . . 323,324 Establishes a School at Canterbury 325 Influence of this School on English Literature 326 690. Ealdhelm in Wessex 326, 327 50-652. Conquest of the Forest of Braden by the West Saxons . . . 328,329 Maidulf Sets Up his "Burh" of Malmesbury 330 Ealdhelm's Work in this Forest Tract 330 Theodore's Second Organization of the Dioceses ..... 331 The English Dioceses Coextensive with the Kingdoms . . . 332 Theodore Subdivides them by Falling Back on the Tribal Demarcations 333 He Divides the See of East Anglia. ....... 333 His Division of the Mercian See 333 Mercia Under King iEthelred 334 The Monastic Movement of this Time Based on — (1) A Passion for Solitude 335 (2) Social Impulse which Followed it 335 The Monasteries Rather Social and Industrial Centres than Religious . 335 Effect of this Impulse in Reclaiming the Country 336 The Forest of Arden 338>339 The Foundation of Evesham 340 The Fens of the Wash 341,342 Guthlac at Croyland 342 The Thames Valley . . . 344 The Nuns of Barking 345 Survey of the Rest of Mid-Britain 346,347 Theodore Invited to Organize the Church in Northumbria . . -347 Ecgfrith, King of the Northumbrians 347 His Conquest of Northern Lancashire and the Lake District . . 347 Carlisle and its Continuous Life . . 348 Ecgfrith's Triumphs over the Picts 349 Ecgfrith Defeats Wulfhere and Recovers Lindsey 350 Condition of Northumbria 350 Monastic Colonies along the Coast 351 Ebba's House at Coldingham 352 Relations of these Monastic Colonies to the Realm, and its Defence . 353 They Bring Labor again into Honor 354, 355 B 709. 675. 678. 679. 682. 684. 685. 685. 690. xv iii CONTENTS. PAGE Influence of the Movement on Poetry 356 Hilda's House at Streonashalh . . . . . . . 356, 357 Story of Csedmon 358 Character of Casdmon's Poem 358, 359 Influence of the Monastic Movement on Art 361,362 Greatness of Bishop Wilfrid 363 Theodore Divides the Northumbrian Dioceses 363 Wilfrid Appeals to Rome and is Exiled from Northumbria . . . 364 He Takes Refuge among and Converts the South Saxons . . . 364 War between Mercia and Northumbria 366 Ecgfrith Forced to Cede Lindsey 366 Theodore Creates Two Fresh Bishoprics in the North . . . . 366 Attack of the Northumbrian Fleet on the Shores of Ireland . . . 366 Rising of the Picts against Ecgfrith . . 367 Cuthbert's Words of Ill-omen 367 Ecgfrith and his Army Slain by the Picts at Nectansmere . . . 368 Wilfrid Submits to Theodore and is Restored to York .... 368 Theodore Dies 369 Later Completion of the Work of Organization by the Development of a Parochial System, by the Endowment of the Clergy, and by the Provision of Discipline within the Church . . . 369,370 CHAPTER VIII. THE THREE KINGDOMS. 690-830. Silent Influence of Theodore's Work in Promoting National Unity The Political Disunion Seems Greater than Ever . Weakness and Anarchy of the West Saxons since Faddiley But their Real Strength not Diminished .... 682. King Centwine Drives the Britons to the Quantocks 685. Ceadwalla Unites All the West Saxons Under his Rule . Conquers Sussex and the Isle of Wight .... 688. Fails in an Attack on Kent and Withdraws to Rome 688-726. Ine Reunites the West Saxons after an Interval of Anarchy 688-694. Forces Kent, Essex, and London to Own his Supremacy 710. Attacks the Kingdom of Dyvnaint .... Founds Taunton in the Conquered Territory . ' . Somerset after its Conquest Mingling of the Two Races seen at Glastonbury . Seen too in the Double City of Exeter . Ine Divides the Bishopric of Wessex 715. He Repulses the Mercian King Ceolred at Wanborough Fresh Outbreak of Anarchy in Wessex . 726. Ine Dies on Pilgrimage to Rome .... 718-757. yEthelbald King of Mercia 728-733. ^Ethelbald Overruns all Wessex .... 733-754. His Supremacy Owned by all the Southern English 37 371 371 1.372 372 373- 374 374 374 375 375 376 377 378 379 379 380 38i 381 382 383 384 384 CONTENTS. x i x A.D. . PAGE 754. The West Saxons Rise and Defeat iEthelbald at Burford . . . 384 Meanwhile Northumbria Stands Apart from the Rest of Britain . . 385 Aldfrith King of Northumbria 385 Peaceful Growth of Learning under his Rule 385 This Learning Summed Up in Baeda 386 His Life at Jarrow 387 His Learning and Works 388 His Ecclesiastical History ........ 389, 390 The Story of his Death 391 His Scheme of Religious Reformation in the North .... 392 735. Ecgberht becomes Archbishop of York 392 738-758. His Brother Eadberht King of the Northumbrians 392 740. Eadberht Repulses both the Mercians and the Picts .... 392 750. Takes Kyle from the Britons of Strathclyde 392 York under Eadberht 394 The School of York under Ecgberht 395 756. Eadberht Defeated by the Picts -396 758. Eadberht and Ecgberht both Withdraw to a Monastery .... 396 The After-history of Northumbria one of Weakness and Anarchy . . 397 Change in the Character of our History 397 England becomes Linked to the Rest of Western Christendom . . 397 The Change Brought About by the Joint Work of English Missionaries and the Franks 398 Growth of the Frankish Kingdom 399 The Franks under Pippin Support the English Missionaries . . . 399 690. Mission of Willibrord 400,401 718-753. Mission Work of Boniface 401,402 Conversion of Germany by the English Missionaries .... 403 Its Results on the History of the Papacy and the Empire . . . 403 It Draws the Frankish Power into Connection with the English king- doms 405 Britain now Definitely Parted into Three Kingdoms .... 405 Losses of Mercia after the Battle of Burford 406 758-796. Offa King of Mercia 406 773. Offa Recovers Kent, Essex, and London 406 777. Drives the West Saxons from the District of the Four Towns . . 406 779. Drives the Welsh from Shropshire 407 754-786. The West Saxons Conquer Devon 408 787. Ecgberht, Driven out of Wessex, Takes Refuge at the Frankish Court . 409 787. Offa Creates the Archbishopric of Lichfield 409 Effect of this had it Lasted 410 Policy of the Franks towards the English Kingdoms . . . .411 Friendly Relations of Charles the Great and Offa 412 Offa, however, on his Guard against Charles 413 English Exiles at the Frankish Court 414 794. Offa Seizes East Anglia 4 J 6 803. His Successor Cenwulf Suppresses the Mercian Archbishopric . . 416 802. Ecgberht becomes King of Wessex 418 xx CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE 808. The Northumbrian King Eardwulf Restored by Pope and Emperor . 419 815-825. Ecgberht's Conquest of Cornwall . . 420 Close of the Struggle with the Britons 420 825. Beornwulf of Mercia Attacks Ecgberht 422 His Defeat at Ellandun 422 Ecgberht Seizes Kent and Essex 422 825-827. East Anglia Rises and Defeats the Mercians 422 829. Ecgberht Conquers Mercia 422, 423 829. Northumbria Submits to Ecgberht 423 All Englishmen in Britain United under one Ruler .... 424 LIST OF MAPS. TAGS I. The English Kingdoms in 600 to face 26 II. Roman Kent 30 III. Eastern Britain 39 IV. Eastern Britain 46 V. Mid-Britain 57 VI. Northern Britain 67 VII. Mid-Britain 71 VIII. Central Britain 74 IX. Eastern Britain 78 X. Southern Britain 85 XI. Early London 96 XII. Southern Britain no XIII. Eastern Britain 120 XIV. Western Britain . . 122 XV. Britain in 580 197 XVI. Southern Britain 203 XVII. Britain in 593 . 209 XVIII. Britain in 616 237 XIX. Britain in 626 253 XX. Britain in 634 267 XXI. Britain in 640 285 XXII. Britain in 658 297 XXIII. Britain in 665 321 XXIV. Southwestern Britain 328 XXV. Mid-Britain from 700 to 800 337 XXVI. Southwestern Britain 377 XXVII. Britain in 750 383 XXVIII. Britain in 792 417 XXIX. Southwestern Britain 421 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. INTRODUCTION. BRITAIN AND ITS FOES. The island of Britain was the latest of Rome's introd. conquests in the West. Though it had been twice The attacked by Julius Caesar, his withdrawal and the conquest. inaction of the earlier emperors promised it a con- tinued freedom ; but, a hundred years after Caesar's landing, Claudius undertook its conquest, and so swiftly was the work carried out by his generals and those of his successor that before thirty years were over the bulk of the country had passed beneath the Roman sway. 1 The island was thus fortunate in the moment of its conquest. It was spared the 1 In these few introductory pages, I need scarcely say that I do not attempt to write a history of Roman Britain. Such a history, indeed, can hardly be attempted with any profit till the scattered records of researches among the roads, villas, tombs, etc., of this period have been in some way brought together and made acces- sible. What I attempt is simply to note those special features of the Roman rule which have left their impress on our after -his- tory. I 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. pillage and exactions which ruined the provinces of Britain Rome under the Republic, while it felt little of the a Foes! S ev ^ s which still clung to their administration under — the earlier Empire. The age in which its organiza- tion was actively carried out was the age of the An- tonines, when the provinces became objects of spe- cial care on the part of the central government, 1 and when the effects of its administration were aided by peace without and a profound tranquillity within. The absence of all record of the change indicates the quietness and ease with which Britain was trans- formed into a Roman province. A census and a land-survey must have formed here, as elsewhere, indispensable preliminaries for the exaction of the poll-tax and the land-tax, which were the main bur- dens of Rome's fiscal system. Within the province the population would, in accordance with her inva- riable policy, be disarmed ; while a force of three legions was stationed, partly in the north to guard against the unconquered Britons, and partly in the west to watch over the tribes which still remained half subdued. Though the towns were left in some measure to their own self-government, the bulk of the island seems to have been ruled by military and financial administrators, whose powers were practi- cally unlimited. But, rough as their rule may have been, it secured peace and good order; and peace and good order were all that was needed to ensure 1 Capitolinus says of Antoninus Pius, " With such diligence did he rule the subject peoples that he cared for all men and all things as his own. All the provinces flourished under him." Hadrian's solicitude was shown by his ceaseless wanderings over the whole Empire, and by the general system of border fortifications of which his wall in Britain formed a part. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 3 material development. This development soon made introd. itself felt. Commerce sprang up in the ports of Brit- Britain ain. Its harvests became so abundant that it was a Foes. 3 able at need to supply the necessities of Gaul. Tin mines were worked in Cornwall, lead mines in Som- erset and Northumberland, and iron mines in the forest of Dean. The villas and homesteads which, as the spade of our archaeologists proves, lay scat- tered over the whole face of the country show the general prosperity of the island. The extension of its road system, and the up- Roman growth of its towns, tell, above all, how rapidly Brit- ain was incorporated into the general body of the Empire. The beacon-fire which blazed on the cliffs of Dover to guide the vessels from the Gaulish shores to the port of Richborough proclaimed the union of Britain with the mainland ; while the route which crossed the downs of Kent from Richborough to the Thames linked the roads that radiated from London over the surface of the island with the gen- eral net-work of communications alon^ which flow- ed the social and political life of the Roman world. When the Emperor Hadrian traversed these roads at the opening of the second century, a crowd of towns had already risen along their course. 1 In the southeast Durovernum, the later Canterbury, con- 1 The bulk of these towns undoubtedly occupied British sites, and were probably only modifications of communities which had already taken a municipal shape in the interval of rapid native de- velopment between the landing of Caesar and the landing of Clau- dius. But these, after all, can have been little more than collec- tions of huts, like the Gaulish communities which had risen under like circumstances ; and the difference between such a community and the meanest Roman town was even materially immense. a THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. nected Richborough with London. In the south- Britain west Venta, or Winchester, formed the centre of the a Foes. S Gwent, or open downs of our Hampshire ; while goutv provincials found their way to the hot springs of Bath, and Exeter looked out from its rise over the Exe on the wild moorlands of the Cornish peninsula. Colchester and Norwich stand on the sites of Ro- man cities which gathered to them the new life of the eastern coast ; and Lindum has left its name to the Lincolnshire which was formed in later days around its ruins. Names as familiar meet us if we turn to central Britain. The uplands of the Cots- wolds were already crowned with the predecessor of our Cirencester, as those of Hertfordshire were crowned by that of our St. Albans ; while Leicester represents as early a centre of municipal life in the basin of the Trent. Even on the skirts of the prov- ince life and industry sheltered themselves under the Roman arms. A chain of lesser places studded the road from York to the savage regions of the north, where the eagles of a legion protected the settlers who were spreading to the Forth and the Clyde. Caerleon sprang from the quarters of another legion which held down the stubborn freedom that linger- ed among the mountains of Wales, and guarded the towns which were rising at Gloucester and Wroxeter in the valley of the Severn ; while Chester owes its existence to the station of a third on the Dee, whose work was to bridle the tribes of North Wales and of Cumbria. 1 1 It is in the age of the Antonines that we first get a detailed knowledge of Britain in the geographical survey of Ptolemy, which gives us the towns of the native tribes (Monum. Hist. Brit., pp. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. r It is easy, however, to exaggerate the civilization introd. of Britain. Even within the province south of the Britain Firths the evidence of inscriptions 1 shows that large a Foes. S tracts of country lay practically outside the Roman In ^.f ect life. Though no district was richer or more peo- civilization Y -i . of Britain. pled than the southwest, our Devonshire and our Cornwall seem to have remained almost wholly Cel- tic. Wales was never really Romanized ; its tribes were held in check by the legionaries at Chester and Caerleon, but as late as the beginning of the third century they called for repression from the Emperor Severus as much as the Picts. 2 The valleys of the Thames and of the Severn were fairly inhabited, but there are fewer proofs of Roman settlement in the valley of the Trent; and though the southern part of Yorkshire was rich and populous, Northern Britain, as a whole, was little touched by the new civ- ilization. And even in the south this civilization can have had but little depth or vitality. Large and important as were some of its towns, hardly any inscriptions have been found to tell of the presence of a vigorous municipal life. Unlike its neighbor Gaul, Britain contributed nothing to the intellectual riches of the Empire ; and not one of the poets or rhetoricians of the time is of British origin. Even x.-xvi.) ; and in the account of its roads and towns given in the Antonine Itinerary (ibid, xx.-xxii.). A few milestones survive, and the names of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, which they bear, fix the general date of this road-making. 1 See Hubner, Inscriptiones Britannia^ Latinae (forming the sev- enth volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, published at Berlin, 1873), a book which must furnish the groundwork of any history of Roman Britain. 2 There are few inscriptions of Roman date from Devon and Cornwall ; none from Wales. 6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. moral movements found little foothold in the island. Britain When Christianity became the religion of the Em- a Foes tS pire under the house of Constantine, Britain must have become nominally Christian ; and the presence of British bishops at ecclesiastical councils is enough to prove that its Christianity was organized in the ordinary form. 1 But as yet no Christian inscription or ornament has been found in any remains of ear- lier date than the close of the Roman rule ; and the undoubted existence of churches at places such as Canterbury, or London, or St. Albans, only gives greater weight to the fact that no trace of such buildings has been found in the sites of other cities which have been laid open by archaeological re- search. its life Far, indeed, as was Britain from the centre of the military. Empire, had the Roman energy wielded its full force in the island it would have Romanized Britain as completely as it Romanized the bulk of Gaul. But there was little in the province to urge Rome to such an effort. It was not only the most distant of all her Western provinces, but it had little natural wealth, and it was vexed by a ceaseless border warfare with the unconquered Britons, the Picts, or Caledonians, beyond the northern firths. There was little in its material resources to tempt men to that immigration from the older provinces of the Empire which was the main agent in civilizing a new conquest. On 1 Stubbs and Haddan (Councils of Great Britain, i. 1-40) have collected the few facts which form the meagre evidence for the ex- istence of Christianity in Britain. Even of this meagre list, some are doubted by so competent an observer as Mr. Raine (Historians of the Church of York, Introd. p. xx. note). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. m the contrary, the harshness of a climate that knew introd. neither olive nor vine deterred men of the south Britain from such a settlement. The care with which every a Foes. S villa is furnished with its elaborate system of hot-air flues shows that the climate of Britain was as intol- erable to the Roman provincial as that of India, in spite of punkas and verandas, is to the English ci- vilian or the English planter. The result was that the province remained a mere military department of the Empire. The importance of its towns was determined by military considerations. In the ear- liest age of the occupation, when the conquerors aimed at a hold on the districts near to Gaul, Col- chester, Verulam, and London were the greatest of British towns. As the tide of war rolled away to the north and west, Chester and Caerleon rivalled their greatness, and York became the capital of the province. It is a significant fact that the bulk of the monuments which have been found in Britain re- late to military life. Its inscriptions and tombs are mostly those of soldiers. Its mightiest work was the great wall and line of legionary stations which guard- ed the province from the Picts. Its only historic records are records of border forays against the bar- barians. If we strive to realize its character from the few facts that we possess, we are forced to look on Britain as a Roman Algeria. It was not merely its distance from the seat of F h sical J m m aspect of rule or the later date of its conquest that hindered Britain. the province from passing completely into the gen- eral body of the Empire. Its physical and its social circumstances offered yet greater obstacles to any effectual civilization. Marvellous as was the rapid g THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. transformation of Britain in the hands of its con- Britain querors, and greatly as its outer aspect came to dif- & Foes! S fe r from that of the island in which Claudius landed, it was far from being in this respect the land of later days. In spite of its roads, its towns, and its mining- works, it remained, even at the close of the Roman rule, an " isle of blowing woodland," a wild and half- reclaimed country, the bulk of whose surface was oc- cupied by forest and waste. The rich and lower soil of the river valleys, indeed, which is now the fa- vorite home of agriculture, had in the earliest times been densely covered with primeval scrub ; and the only open spaces were those whose nature fitted them less for the growth of trees — the chalk downs and oolitic uplands that stretched in long lines across the face of Britain from the Channel to the Northern Sea. In the earliest traces of our histo- ry, these districts became the seats of a population and a tillage which have long fled from them, as the gradual clearing-away of the woodland drew men to the richer soil. Such a transfer of population seems faintly to have begun even before the coming of the Romans; and the roads which they drove through the heart of the country, the waste caused by their mines, the ever-widening circle of cultivation round their towns, must have quickened this social change. But even after four hundred years of their occupation the change was far from having been completely brought about. It is mainly in the natural clearings of the uplands that the population concentrated itself at the close of the Roman rule, and it is over these dis- tricts that the ruins of the villas or country-houses of the Roman landowners are most thickly scattered. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. g Such spaces were found, above all, at the extremi- introd. ties of the great chalk ranges which give form and Britain character to the scenery of Southern Britain. Half- a £ es. S way along our southern coast, the huge block of up- ^ land which we know as Salisbury Plain and the Marl- downs - borough Downs rises in gentle undulations from the alluvial flat of the New Forest to the lines of escarp- ment which overlook the vale of Pewsey and the upper basin of the Thames. From the eastern side of this upland three ranges of heights run athwart Southern Britain to the northeast and the east, the first passing from the Wiltshire Downs by the Chil- terns to the uplands of East Anglia, while the second and third diverge to form the north downs of Surrey or the south downs of Sussex. At the extremities of these lines of heights the upland broadens out into spaces which were seized on from the earliest times for human settlement. The downs of our Hamp- shire formed a "gwent," or open clearing, whose name still lingers in its " Gwentceaster," or Winches- ter ; while the upland which became the later home of the North-folk and South-folk formed another and a broader " gwent " which gave its name to the Gwenta of the Iceni, the predecessor of our Norwich. The north downs, as they neared the sea, widened out, in their turn, into a third upland that still preserves its name of the Caint or Kent, and whose broad front ran from the cliffs of Thanet to those of Dover and Folkestone. Free spaces of the same character were found on the Cotswolds or on the wolds of Lincoln and York ; and in all we find traces of early culture and of the presence of a population which has passed away as tillage was drawn to richer soils. IO THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. The transfer of culture and population, indeed, Britain had begun before the conquest of Claudius ; ' and a Foes! S the position of many Roman towns shows how busily ThTZaste ^ was can "i e d on through the centuries of Roman andfen. ru i e# But even at the close of this rule the clear- ings along the river valleys were still mere strips of culture which threaded their way through a mighty waste. To realize the Britain of the Roman age, we must set before us the Poland or Northern Russia of our own ; a country into whose tracts of forest land man is still hewing his way, and where the clearings round town or village hardly break the reaches of silent moorlands or as silent fens. The wolf roamed over the long " desert " that stretched from the Cheviots to the Peak. Beavers built in the streams of marshy hollows such as that which reached from Beverley to Ravenspur. 2 The wild bull wandered through forest after forest from Ettrick to H amp- stead. 3 Though the Roman engineers won fields from Romney Marsh on the Kentish coast, nothing broke the solitude of the peat-bogs which stretched up the Parrett into the heart of Somersetshire, of the swamp which struck into the heart of the island along the lower Trent, or of the mightier fen along the eastern coast, the Wash, which then ran inland up the Witham all but to Lincoln, and up the Nen and the Cam as far as Huntingdon and Cambridge. 4 1 Raine, Historians of the Church of York, Introd. pp. ix. x. 2 Boyd Dawkins, Cave-hunting, pp. 76, 132. 3 Even in the twelfth century the forest district north of London was full of wild boars and wild oxen, " latebra? . . . aprorum et tau- rorum sylvestrium." FitzStephen's " Life of Becket," in Giles, St. Thorn. Cant. i. 173. * Pearson, Historical Maps of England, p. 3. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. U But neither moor nor fen covered so vast a space introd. of Britain as its woods. 1 The wedge of forest and Britain scrub that filled the hollow between the north and ^oeT south downs stretched in an unbroken mass for a ^ hundred and twenty miles, from Hampshire to the woodland. valley* of the Medway ; but, huge as it was, this " An- dredsweald " w r as hardly greater than other of the woodlands which covered Britain. A line of thick- ets along the shore of the Southampton Water link- ed it with as large a forest tract to the west, a frag- ment of which survives in our New Forest, but which then bent away through the present Dorsetshire and spread northward round the western edge of the Wiltshire Downs to the valley of the Frome. The line of the Severn was blocked above Worcester by the forest of Wyre, which extended northward to Cheshire ; while the Avon skirted the border of a mighty woodland, of which Shakspere's Arden be- came the dwindled representative, and which all but covered the area of the present Warwickshire. Away to the east the rises of Highgate and Hampstead formed the southern edge of a forest tract that stretched without a break, to the Wash, and thus al- most touched the belt of woodland which ran athwart Mid-Britain in the forests of Rockingham and Charn- wood, and in the Brunewald of the Lincoln heights. The northern part of the province was yet wilder and more inaccessible than the part to the south; for while Sherwood and Needwood filled the space be- 1 See Guest, Early English Settlements in Britain (Salisbury vol- ume of Proceedings of Archaeological Institute), pp. 31, 32. I shall deal more at large with these swamps and woodlands as we meet them in our story. I2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. tvveen the Peak and the Trent, the Vale of York Britain was pressed between the moorlands of Pickering and a Foes. S the waste or " desert " that stretched from the Peak of Derbyshire to the Roman wall; and beyond the wall to the Forth the country was little more than a vast wilderness of moorland and woodland which later times knew as the forest of Selkirk. Divisions j\ s we follow its invaders step by step across Brit- among . in i • -i i r proyin- am, we shall see how wide these forests were, and what hindrances they threw in the way of its assail- ants. But they must have thrown almost as great hindrances in the way of its civilization. The cities of the province, indeed, were thoroughly Romanized. Within the walls of towns such as Lincoln or York, towns governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by the net-work of roads which reached from one end of the island to the other, law, language, political and so- cial life, all were of Rome. But if the towns were thoroughly Romanized, it seems doubtful, from the few facts that remain to us, whether Roman civiliza- tion had made much impression on the bulk of the provincials, or whether the serf- like husbandmen whose cabins clustered round the luxurious villas of the provincial landowners, or the yet more servile miners of Northumbria and the forest of Dean, were touched by the arts and knowledge of their masters. The use of the Roman language may be roughly taken as marking the progress of the Roman civilization ; and though Latin had all but wholly superseded the languages of the conquered peoples in Spain and Gaul, its use was probably limited in Britain to the townsfolk and to the wealthier pro- THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. ! 3 prietors without the towns. Over large tracts of introd. country the rural Britons seemed to have remained Britain apart from their conquerors, not only speaking their a F 0e s! S own language, and owning some traditional allegi- ance to their native chiefs, but retaining their native system of law. Imperial edicts had long since ex- tended Roman citizenship to every dweller within the Empire ; but the wilder provincials may have been suffered to retain, in some measure, their own usages, as the Zulu or the Maori is suffered to re- tain them, though subject in theory to British law, and entitled to the full privileges of British subjects. The Welsh laws which we possess in a later shape are undoubtedly, in the main, the same system of early customs which Rome found existing among the Britons in the days of Claudius and Caesar; 1 and the fact that they remained a living law when her legions withdrew proves their continuance through- out the four hundred years of her rule, as it proves the practical isolation from Roman life and Roman civilization of the native communities which pre- served them. The dangers that sprang from such a severance inroads of between the two elements of its population must have been stirred into active life by the danger which threatened Britain from the north. No Roman ruler had succeeded in reducing the districts beyond the firths ; and the Britons who had been sheltered from the Roman sword by the fastnesses of the Highlands were strong enough from the opening of the second century to turn fiercely on their opponents. The 1 Sir H. Maine, Early History of Institutions, p. 6. I4 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. wall which the Emperor Hadrian drew across the Britain moors from Newcastle to Carlisle marks the first a Foes! S stage in a struggle with these Caledonians or Picts which lasted to the close of the Roman rule. But even without such a barrier the disciplined soldiers of the Empire could easily have held at bay enemies such as these: and when we find the Picts pene- trating in the midst of the fourth century into the heart of Britain, it can hardly have been without the aid of disaffection within the province itself. For such disaffection the same causes must have existed in Britain as we know to have existed in Gaul. The purely despotic system of the Roman government crushed all local vigor by crushing local indepen- dence : and here, as elsewhere, population was, no doubt, declining as the area of slave-culture widened with the sinking of the laborer into a serf. If the mines were worked by forced labor, they would have been a source of endless oppression ; while town and country alike were drained by heavy taxation, and in- . dustry fettered by laws that turned every trade into an hereditary caste. But the disaffection which backed the Pictish invader found a firmer groundwork in Britain than in other imperial districts which suffer- ed from the same misrule. Once within the prov- ince, the Picts would meet kindred of their own, who, though conquered, were hardly more Romanized than themselves, and whom a jealousy of the Romanized townsfolk might easily rouse to arms. That such a division between its inhabitants broke the strength of Britain at a later time is nearly certain ; that it had begun in the middle of the fourth century is probable from the character of the Pictish inroad THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 15 Saxons. which all but tore Britain from the Empire in the introd. reign of Valentinian. The inroad was met by his . Britain general, Theodosius, and the Picts driven back to a F es. 3 their mountains; but Theodosius had found South- ern Britain itself in possession of the invaders, 1 Raids so extensive as this could hardly have been effected without aid from within ; and the social con- dition of the island was such that help from within may have been largely given. The Picts, however, were far from being the only The enemies who were drawn at this moment to the plun- der of the province. While their clans surged against the Roman wall, the coasts of Britain were being har- ried by marauders from the sea. The boats of Irish pirates — or, as they were then called, Scots — ravaged its western shores, while a yet more formidable race of freebooters pillaged from Portsmouth to the Wash. In their homeland between the Elbe and the Ems, as well as in a wide tract across the Ems to the Rhine, a number of German tribes had drawn to- gether into the people of the Saxons, and it was to this people that the pirates of the Channel belonged. 2 Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one of the war keels of these early seamen. The boat is flat-bottomed, seventy feet long, and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the waves with a freight of warriors whose arms — axes, swords, lances, and knives — were found heaped 1 Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xxvii. cc. 8, 9 (Monum. Hist. Brit, p. Ixxiii.). 2 Their first recorded appearance off the coast of Gaul is in A.D, 287. Eutropius, ix. 21 (Monum. Hist, Brit. p. Ixxii.). piracy. j£ THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. together in its hold. 1 Like the galleys of the Middle Britain Ages, such boats could only creep cautiously along a roes! S from harbor to harbor in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the vessel on any fitting coast ; and a step on shore at once transformed the boatmen into a war band. ■Their A letter which a Roman provincial, Sidonius Apol- linaris, wrote in warning to a friend who had em- barked as an officer in the Channel fleet, which was "looking out for the pirate-boats of the Saxons," gives us a glimpse of these freebooters as they ap- peared to the civilized world of the fifth century. "When 2 you see their rowers," says Sidonius, "you may make up your mind that every one of them is an arch-pirate, with such wonderful unanimity do all of them at once command, obey, teach, and learn their business of brigandage. This is why I have to warn you to be more than ever on your guard in this war- fare. Your foe is of all foes the fiercest. 3 He at- tacks unexpectedly ; if you expect him, he makes his escape; he despises those who seek to block his path ; he overthrows those who are off their guard ; he cuts off any enemy whom he follows ; while, for himself, he never fails to escape when he is forced to fly. And, more than this, to these men a shipwreck is a school of seamanship rather than a matter of 1 Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 8, 9. 2 Sidon. Apollin. Epist. viii. 6 (Migne, Patrologia, vol. lviii. col. 597). 3 " Hostis est omni hoste truculentior." THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 17 dread. They know the dangers of the deep like men introd. who are every day in contact with them. For since Britain a storm throws those whom they wish to attack off a F 0e s. S their guard, while it hinders their own coming onset from being seen from afar, they gladly risk them- selves in the midst of wrecks and sea-beaten rocks in the hope of making profit out of the very tem- pest." : The picture is one of men who were not merely T ! ldr J slave- greedy freebooters, but finished seamen, and who hunting. had learned. " barbarians " as they were, how to com- mand and how to obey in their school of war. But it was not the daring or the pillage of the Saxons that spread terror along the Channel so much as their cruelty. It was by this that the Roman pro- vincials distinguished them 2 from the rest of the German races who were attacking the Empire ; for while men noted in the Frank his want of faith, in the Alan his greed, in the Hun his shamelessness, in the Gepid an utter absence of any trace of civil- ization, what they noted in the Saxon was his savage cruelty. It was this ruthlessness that made their descents on the coast of the Channel so terrible to the provincials. The main aim of these pirate raids, as of the pirate raids from the north, hundreds of years later, was man-hunting — the carrying-off of 1 Cf. Sidon. Apollin. Carm. vii. (Monum. Hist. Brit. p. c.) : " Quin et Aremoricus piratam Saxona tractus Sperabat, cui pelle salum sulcare Britannum Ludus, et assuto glaucum mare findere lembo." 2 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei, iv. 14: "Gens Saxonum fera est, Francorum infidelis, Gepidarum inhumana, Chunorum impudica," etc. jg THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. men, women, and children into slavery. But the Britain slave-hunting of the Saxons had features of peculiar a Foes. S horror. " Before they raise anchor and set sail from the hostile continent for their own homeland, their wont when they are on the eve of returning is to slay by long and painful tortures one man in every ten of those they have taken, in compliance with a religious use which is even more lamentable than superstitious ; and for this purpose to gather the whole crowd of doomed men together, and temper the injustice of their fate by the mock justice of casting lots for the victims. Though such a rite is not so much a sacrifice that cleanses as a sacrilege that de- files them, the doers of this deed of blood deem it a part of their religion rather to torture their captives than to take ransom for them." 1 Saxons From the close of the third century the raids of channel, these Saxons had been felt along the coasts of Gaul, and a fleet which appears from this time in the Channel must have been manned to resist them. It is not, however, till the year 364 2 that we hear of 1 " Mos est remeaturis decimum quemque captorum {caproriun Migne) per sequales et cruciarias pcenas, plus ob hoc tristi quam superstitioso ritu, necare ; superque collectam turbam periturorum, mortis iniquitatem sortis sequitate dispergere. Talibus eligunt vo- tis, victimis solvunt; et per hujusmodi non tam sacrificia purgati quam sacrilegia polluti, religiosum putant csedis infaustae perpetra- tores de capite captivo magis exigere tormenta quam pretia." 1 have ventured to base my version of this letter on a spirited though free translation given by Mr. Hodgkin, in Italy and her In- vaders, vol. ii. p. 365. The "cruciarias pcenas," which Mr. Hodgkin renders "crucifixion," are more probably something like the " spread- eagle " of the later Northmen. 2 " Cum (Carausius) per tractum Belgicae et Armoricae pacandum mare accepisset quod Franci et Saxones infestabant." Eutrop. (Monum. Hist. Brit. p. lxxii.) ; Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xxvi. c. 4. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 19 them as joining in any attack upon Britain itself; introd. but from this moment their ravages seem to have Britain been ceaselessly carried on, and their presence off a £ es* s its shores became one among the pressing difficulties which the country had to meet. For the road be- tween Britain and Rome lay across the Channel; and the occupation of the waters or coasts of the Channel by a pirate fleet was not only fatal to the trade of the province with the European mainland, but threatened its connection with the central gov- ernment, and cut it off from the body of the Empire. It is to the years, therefore, that followed this joint attack of Saxon and Pict that we must look for the date of two measures which mark what we may term a change of front in the military administration of Britain. It was probably now that her greater towns strengthened themselves with walls — a change which implied dread of an attack from which the Roman troops might be unable to defend them ; while the pressure of the Saxons, as well as the district on which it told, is marked by the organization of the coast from the Wash to Southampton Water under an officer who bore the title of " Count of the Mari- time Tract," or " of the Saxon Shore." 1 " Hoc tempore . . . Picti Saxonesque et Scoti et Attacotti Britannos Eerumnis vexavere continuis " (Monum. Hist. Brit. p. lxxiii.). 1 In the full description of his office and troops (" Notitia utri- usque Imperii," Monum. Hist. Brit. p. xxiv.) the style of this officer is " Comes Limitis Saxonici per Britanniam." Elsewhere (ibid. p. xxiii.) he is informally " Comes Littoris Saxonici per Britannias." The arguments of Lappenberg (Anglo-Saxon Kings, ed. 1881, i. 57, 58), Kemble (Saxons in England, i. 10, 11, 14), and others for an earlier date for this shore, as well as for the derivation of the name from a Saxon settlement along it rather than its use as a barrier against Saxon descents, though still maintained by Mr. Skene (.Cel- . 20 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. It was here that Britain lay most open to the Britain pirates' forays. Unguarded by the cliffs and bleak a Foes! S moorlands that ran northward along the coast from ThTsaxon^^ Humber to the Tweed, or by forests such as shore, lined the shore from Portsmouth to the west, the tract which was known as the Saxon Shore present- ed along its whole line natural features that invited and favored attack. Its sea-brim was fringed with marshy islands or low tracts of alluvial soil which offered secure points of landing or anchorage, and broken by large estuaries whose waters gave access to the country behind them ; while from these lower parts the land rose within into downs and uplands which were at once easy to overrun and favorable for settlement. But the measures of defence which were now taken more than compensated for the nat- ural weakness of the island in this quarter. The coast was lined with strong fortresses. 1 At Bran- caster in Norfolk the northernmost of these watched the inlet of the Wash and guarded the East-Anglian Downs. In our Suffolk a stronghold now known as Burgh Castle blocked the estuary of the Yare, as the walls of Colchester barred the inlet of the Stoui\, Othona, a fortress at the mouth of the Blackwater, tic Scotland, vol. i. p. 151), have been satisfactorily refuted by Dr. Guest (E. E. Sett. p. 33 et seq), whose judgment is adopted by Mr. Freeman (Norm. Conq. i. 11, note), and by Professor Stubbs (Constit. Hist. i. 67, note). The Notitia Imperii, in which alone the term is found, was drawn up about a.d. 400 ; possibly in 403. (Hodgson Hinde, Hist, of Northumberland, i. pt. 1, pp. 18, 19.) 1 The list is given in the Notitia Imperii (Monum. Hist. Brit, p. xxiv), with the disposition of the troops in each fortress. Lon- don and the towns at Canterbury and Rochester, though backing this line of defence, were not subject to the Count of the Saxon Shore. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 2I protected the southern flats of our Essex ; while introd. London forbade all passage up the Thames. Kent Britain was the most vital point of all, for through it passed F es. S the line of communication between Britain and Rome; and a group of fortresses, admirably dis- posed, protected this passage. One guarded Rich- borough, which was the common port for all traffic from Gaul ; a second at Reculver held the entrance of the sea-channel which then parted Thanet from the mainland, and through which vessels passed to London by the estuary of the Thames ; while walled towns on the site of our Canterbury and of our Roch- ester protected the points at which the road from Richborough to London passed the Stour and the Medway. 1 Three other fortresses held the coast of the Channel as far as the great woods which hin- dered all landing to the west. Lymne guarded the lowlands of Kent and the reclaimed tracts of Romney Marsh ; Anderida, the modern Pevensey, held our Sussex ; while Porchester marks the site of a castle which looked over the Southampton Water and blocked the road to the downs. Garrisoned as they were by a force of at least ten withdraw- thousand men, the legion placed at the command of mans from the Count of the Saxon Shore, these fortresses were Britam - too strong a barrier for the pirates to break ; and we may set aside the theories which, in ignorance of the military strength of the Empire and of its hold over the provinces, suppose them to have conquered and settled here for centuries before the close of the Ro- 1 The Notitia stations troops at Dover ; but it is doubtful wheth- er there was any Roman fortress there. Clark, " Dover Castle," Archaeol. Journ. vol. xxxii. p. 440. 22 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. man rule. Up to the moment, indeed, when the Im- Britain perial troops quitted Britain, we see them able easily a Foes. S to repel the attacks of its barbarous assailants. When a renewal of their inroads left Britain weak and ex- hausted at the accession of the Emperor Honorius, the Roman general Stilicho renewed the triumphs which Theodosius had won. 1 The Pict was driven back afresh, the Saxon boats chased by his galleys as far as the Orkneys, and the Saxon Shore prob- ably strengthened with fresh fortresses. But the campaign of Stilicho was the last triumph of the Empire in its Western waters. The struggle Rome had waged so long drew, in fact, to its end. At the opening of the fifth century her resistance suddenly broke down ; and the savage mass of barbarism with which she had battled broke in upon the Empire at a time when its force was sapped by internal decay. In its western dominions, where the German peoples were its foes, the triumph of its enemies was com- plete. The Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West Goths conquered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East Goths ruled at last in Italy itself. And now that the fated hour was come, the Saxons too closed upon their prey. The condition of the province invited their attack, for the strength of the Empire, broken everywhere by mili- tary revolts, was nowhere more broken than in Brit- 1 Claudian, De Tert. Consul. Honorii, ap. Monum. Hist. Brit. p. xcviii. " Maduerunt Saxone fuso Orcades ; incaluit Pictorum sanguine Thule ; Scotorum cumulos flevit glacialis Ierne." THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 23 ain, where the two legions which remained quartered INTR0D - at Richborough and York set up more than once Britain their chiefs as emperors, and followed them across Foes, the Channel in a march upon Rome. The last of these pretenders, Constantine, crossed over to Gaul in 407 with the bulk of the soldiers quartered in Britain, and the province seems to have been left to its own defence ; for it was no longer the legionaries, but " the people of Britain," who, " taking up arms," repulsed a new onset of the barbarians. As the Empire was organized, such a rising in arms was a defiance of its laws and a practical overthrow of the whole system of government ; and it was naturally followed by the expulsion of Constantine's officials and the creation of a civil administration on the part of the provincials. Independent, however, as they found themselves, they had no wish to break away from Rome. Their rising had been against a usurper: and they appealed to Honorius to accept their obedience and replace the troops. But the legions of the Empire were needed to guard Rome itself; and in 410 a letter of the Emperor bade Brit- ain provide for its own government and its own de- fence. 1 Few statements are more false than those which The Brit- picture the British provincials as cowards, or their" struggle against the barbarian as a weak and un- worthy one. Nowhere, in fact, through the whole circuit of the Roman world, was so long and so des- perate a resistance offered to the assailants of the Empire. Unaided as she was left, Britain held brave- 1 Zosimus, lib. vi. c. 10, ap. Monum. Hist. Brit. p. lxxix. 2 A THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. introd. ]y out as soon as her first panic was over; and for Britain some thirty years after the withdrawal of the legions a Foes! S the free province maintained an equal struggle against her foes. 1 Of these she probably counted the Saxons as still the least formidable. The free- booters from Ireland were not only scourging her western coast, but planting colonies at points along its line. To the north of the Firth of Clyde these " Scots " settled about this time in the peninsula of Argyle. To the south of it they may have been the Gael who mastered and gave their name to Gallo- way ; and there are some indications that a larger though a less permanent settlement was being made in the present North Wales. The Pict was an even more pressing danger. If he made no settlements, his raids grew fiercer and fiercer; and though once at least a general rising of despair drove him back from the very heart of the country, 2 as the fifth cen- tury wore on Britain was torn with a civil strife which made united resistance impossible. Its fort- unes, indeed, at this time have reached us only in late and questionable traditions ; 3 but there is much 1 Later tradition attributed the Wall and the castles of the Saxon Shore to this time. Gildas (ed. Stevenson), Hist. sec. 18. 2 Gildas (Hist. c. 20) makes a fruitless appeal to the Empire pre- ceding this rally. As the letter is to " Agitio ter consuli," and ^tius was consul for the third time in 446, it cannot have been earlier than this date. (Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 43.) For the political struggles, see Guest, ibid. 49, 50. 3 Our only British informants for this period, as for the conquest that followed it, are Gildas (Historia and Epistola — really a single work ; cf. Stubbs and Haddan, Councils, i. 44) and Nennius (Hist. Britonum). Both are edited by Stevenson, and the first may be found in Monum. Hist. Brit. The genuineness of Gildas, which has been doubted, may now be looked on as established (see Stubbs and Haddan, Councils of Britain, i. 44). Skene (Celtic Scotland, i. 116, THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 25 to confirm the main outline of the story which these introd. traditions preserve. City and country, Roman part Britain and native part, may well have risen in arms against F es. one another ; and under a leader of native blood the latter seem to have been successful over their Ro- manized opponents. But even this failed to unite the province when the Pict poured afresh over the Roman wall, and the boats of the Irish and English marauders appeared again off its coasts. The one course which seemed left was to imitate the fatal policy by which Rome had invited its doom while striving to avert it — the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. 1 It was with this view that Brit- ain turned to what seemed the weakest of her assail- ants, and strove to find among the freebooters who were harrying her eastern coast troops whom she could use as mercenaries against the Pict. note) gives a critical account of the various biographies of Gildas. He seems to have been born in 516, probably in the North-Welsh valley of the Clwyd ; to have left Britain for Armorica when thirty years old, or in 546 ; to have written his History there about 556 or 560 ; to have crossed to Ireland between 566 and 569 ; and to have died there in 570. For the nature and date of the compilation which bears the name of Nennius, see Guest, Early English Settle- ments, p. 36, and Stevenson's introduction to his edition of him. In its earliest form, it is probably of the seventh century. Little, how- ever, is to be gleaned from the confused rhetoric of Gildas ; and it is only here and there that we can use the earlier facts which seem to be embedded among the later legends of Nennius. 1 Gildas, Hist. cc. 22, 23. 2 5 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. THE CONQUEST OF THE SAXON SHORE. 449-r. 500. Landing In the year 449 or 450 1 a band of warriors was juta. drawn to the shores of Britain by the usual pledges of land and pay. The warriors were Jutes, men of 1 With Mr. Freeman and Mr. Stubbs, I accept the argument of Dr. Guest (Early English Settlements in South Britain, p. 43, etc.) as conclusive in favor of the date 449 or 450 for this first settlement of the invaders. The date really rests on the authority of Gildas and of Bseda. The first places the coming of the strangers after the letter in which the Britons sought help from ^Etius in his third consulship, i. e. in 446. Bseda, who generally follows Gildas in his story, fixes it in the reign of Marcian, which he believed to begin in 449, and which in his English Chronicle he had begun in 452, but which really began in 450 and ended in 457. Bseda's words (Hist. Eccl. lib. i. c. 15) simply place the landing in Marcian's reign ; but they were generally read as assigning it to the first year of his reign, and hence the English Chronicle, followed by later writers, assigned it to 449. The work of Nennius gives three other dates. One passage, added in the ninth century, and therefore of little weight, assigns it to 392. Another places it in 428. But the only important statement is one which Mr. Skene attributes to the work " as originally compiled in the seventh century," and which runs, " Regnante Gratiano secundo Equantio Romse Saxones a Guorthi- gerno suscepti sunt anno {quadrvigentesz'mo, Stev. ) trecentesimo quadragesimo septimo post passionem Christi" (Nennius, ed. Ste- venson, c. 31). This would be 374, when Gratian was consul with Equitius ; and probably arose from a confusion of the great inroad of the Saxons which occupied Theodosius in the first and second years of Gratian's rule, with their permanent landing in Britain. The arguments for these earlier dates have been recently restated in Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. 146 et seq. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 27 a tribe which has left its name to Jutland, at the chap.i. extremity of the peninsula that projects from the Thecon- shores of North Germany, but who were probably t 2e Saxon akin to the race that was fringing the opposite coast shore - of Scandinavia and settling in the Danish isles. In 44 9-c-500. three " keels " — so ran the legend of their conquest — and with their ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at their head, these Jutes landed at Ebbsfleet 1 in the Isle of Thanet. With the landing of Hengest and his war band English history begins. 2 We have no longer to 1 " Eopwine's fleot," English Chronicle, a. 449. The older name for Thanet, Ruim, is preserved in the local name Ramsgate. 2 The story of the English conquest, as a whole, rests on the au- thority of the English Chronicle, as to the general composition and value of which I shall speak more largely later on. The annals from 449 to the end of the English conquest — with which we are here concerned — were probably embodied in the Chronicle in the middle of the ninth century. "They represent," says Mr. Earle, "the gleanings and reconstruction of the half-lost early history of Wessex at the time of the first compilation in 855. Embodying antiquities of a high type, this section is not the oldest composition preserved in this Chronicle. It is such history as could still be made out of oral traditions, and it probably represents the collected in- formation of the bardic memory, aided by the runic stones and the roll of kings" (Earle, Two Parallel Chronicles, Introduction, p. ix.). Into some of these early entries a mythical element certainly enters (as in the names of Port and Wightgar, eponyms of Portsmouth and Wightgaraburh or Carisbrook), and we may perhaps detect traces of " an artificial chronology in which eight and four are prev- alent factors " (Earle, Par. Chron. Intr. p. ix. ; see, however, on this matter, Guest, E. E. Sett., Salisbury vol. of Archaeol. Institute, p. 38 et seq.) ; but there is no real ground for the general scepticism as to the whole run of dates and facts expressed by writers such as Lap- penberg (Angl. Sax. [1881] i. 97 et seq). See Stubbs (Constit. Hist, i. 46) and Guest (E. E. Sett. pp. 38-42, etc.), whose conclusions are accepted by Mr. Freeman (Norm. Conq. i. 9, note). The later Eng- lish accounts of this period, such as those of Asser, Ethelward, or Florence, are all based on the Chronicle. 2 8 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. wa tch the upgrowth of Roman life in a soil from The con- which Roman life has been swept away, or to ques- tne saxon tion the dim records of a vanished past in the vain shore, j^pg f reC alling the life that our fathers lived in 449-C.50Q. their homeland by the Baltic. From the hour when they set foot on the sands of Thanet we follow the story of Englishmen in the land they made their own. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of ground with a few gray cottages dotted over it, cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. Taken as a whole, indeed, the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the ri^ht the white curve of Rams^ate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay ; while far away to the left across gray marsh-levels, where tiny smoke- wreaths mark the sites of Richborough and Sand- wich, the coast-line bends dimly to the fresh rise of cliffs beyond Deal. But a higher sense than that of beauty draws us to the landing-place of our fathers. No spot in Britain can be so sacred to Englishmen as that which first felt the tread of English feet. Everything in the character of the ground confirms the tradition which fixes this spot at Ebbsfleet ; for, great as the physical changes of the country have been since the fifth century, they have told little on its main features. At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of sea parted Thanet from the main- land of Britain ; for the marshes which stretch from Reculver to Sandwich were then, as they remained for centuries, 1 a wide sea-channel, hardly less than 1 In Bseda's day this channel was about three furlongs wide (Bseda, Hist. Eccl. lib. i. c. 25). The tolls of the ferry over it at Sarre were still valuable in Edward the Third's days ; and it was not till the THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 2 Q a mile across, through which vessels from Gaul chap. i. commonly made their way into the estuary of the The con- Thames. The mouth of this inlet was narrowed by the^axon two sand-spits, now lost in the general level of the Shore - soil, but which at that time jutted out from either 4£9-c.50Q. shore into the waves. On the southern spit stands the present town of Sandwich, while the northern is still known by the name of Ebbsfleet. If the war- ships of the pirates, therefore, were cruising off the coast at the moment when the bargain which gave them' Thanet was struck, their disembarkation at Ebbsfleet, where they first touched its soil, was nat- ural enough. The choice of the spot suggests, too, that their landing was a peaceful one. Richbor- ough, a fortress whose broken ramparts rise hard by above the gray flats of Minster Marsh, and which was then the common landing-place of travellers from Gaul, was too important a spot to have been left without a British garrison. Even if it had ceased to be the station of the fleet that guarded the Chan- nel, it still commanded the road which ran through Kent to London ; and some force must have re- placed the legionary troops that held it when it was the headquarters of the Count of the Saxon Shore. That no record remains of any encounter with these troops at Richborough may well have been because the Jutes who landed under Hengest landed not as enemies, but as allies. The after-course of events, indeed, seems to show The jntes that the choice of this landing-place was the result time of Henry the Seventh that the gradual silting-up of the inlet forced Kent to replace the ferry by a bridge and road at this point (Archaeol. Cantiana, vol. v. p. 306). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. of a settled design. 1 Between the Briton and his The con- hireling soldiers there could be little trust. Quar- thesaxon ters m Thanet would satisfy the followers of Hen- shore. gest, 2 who thus lay encamped within sight of their 449-c. 500. fellow -pirates in the Channel, and who felt them- selves secured against the treachery which had often "■-" r^j d^o* ?&*«•»£- %j»t«. J ^^FolL^stone a°-i°&^ ^v- v ° P °, RTUS lew mm is DURQVERNUM. English CAHTVTJIR A BYRIG. Modern Canterbury. English Miles, Stanford's neorrrrtphiml Fstab ■ proved fatal to the Germans whom Rome called to her aid by the broad inlet that parted their camp from the mainland. But the choice was no less 1 We are thrown here wholly on Gildas, sec. 23. 2 Solinus speaks of Thanet as fruitful in cornfields (Monum. Hist. Brit. p. x.). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 2 1 satisfactory to the provincial himself, trembling — chap. r. and, as the event proved, justly trembling — lest in Thecon- his zeal against the Pict he had brought an even tietexon fiercer foe into Britain. For his dangerous allies shore - were cooped in a corner of the land, and parted 449 ~ c - 50 °- from the bulk of Britain by a sea -channel which was guarded by the strongest fortresses of the coast. The need of such precautions was seen in the dis- putes which arose as soon as the work for which the mercenaries had been hired was done. In the first years that followed after their landing, Jute and Briton fought side by side ; and the Picts are said to have at last been scattered to the winds in a great battle on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their numbers probably grew fast as the news of their settlement in Thanet spread among their fellow -pirates who were haunting the Channel; and with the increase of their number must have grown the difficulty of supplying them with rations and pay. The dispute which rose over these questions was Hmgesfs at last closed by Hengest's men with a threat of war. But the threat, as we have seen, was no easy one to carry out. 1 Right across their path in any 1 In tracing the English conquest of Kent, as in the conquest of Sussex and Wessex, I have been mainly guided by the researches of Dr. Guest (Early English Settlements in South Britain, in the Sal- isbury vol. of Proceedings of the Archaeological Institute for 1849). I cannot, with Mr. Freeman, profess myself "an unreserved follower of that illustrious scholar ;" for the advance of linguistic science has set aside many of the conclusions he has drawn from Welsh philology, while, in his researches into the history of the princes of North Wales and Damnonia, he has placed far too great a reliance on the documents, many spurious and all tampered with, contained 3 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. attack upon Britain stretched the inlet of sea that The con- parted Thanet from the mainland, a strait which was the^axon then traversable only at low water 1 by a long and shore. d an g er0 us ford, and guarded at either mouth by for- 449-c.50o. tresses. The channel of the Medway, with the forest of the Weald bending round from it to the south, furnished a second line of defence for our West Kent and Sussex ; while the strongholds of Dover and Lymne guarded their portion of the Saxon Shore. Great, however, as these difficulties were, they failed to check the onset of the Jutes. From the spot at which the conflict between Hengest and the Britons took place in 455/ we may gather that his attack was a sudden one, and that the success of the invaders was due mainly to a surprise. The in- let may have been crossed before any force could be collected to oppose the English onset, or the boats of the Jutes may have pushed from the centre of it up the channel of its tributary, the Stour, itself at that time a wide and navigable estuary, to the town that stood on the site of our Canterbury, the town of Durovernum. Durovernum had grown up among in the Book of Llandaff. (For the real character of these docu- ments, see Mr. Haddan's note in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, vol. i. p. 147.) But when these deductions are made, they do little to lessen the debt which our early history owes to Dr. Guest. By his combination of archaeological research and knowledge of the ground, with an exact study of the meagre documentary evidence, he has not only restored, so far as they can be restored, many pages of a lost chapter of our history — that of the conquest of Britain — but he has furnished a method for after-inquirers, of which I have striven, however imperfectly, to avail myself in the pages that follow. 1 Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 53, note. By Bseda's day this inlet was known to Englishmen as the Wantsum. 2 E. Chron. a. 455. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. ,- the marshes of the Stour, a little cluster of houses chap. i. raised above the morass on a foundation of piles. The con- But small as the town was, it stood at a point where tKaxon the roads from Richborough, Dover, and Reculver shore - united to pass by a ford traversable at low water on 44 9-c.5oo. their way to London ; and the military importance of its position was marked by the rough oval of massive walls which lay about it. The strength of the place was doubled by the broad river channel that guarded it on the northwest and the marshy ground which stretched along its northeastern side. In this quarter a Christian church had risen on a site destined to be occupied in after-days by the mother- church of all England ; while another church, that was to be hardly less memorable in our religious annals, lay without the walls of the town on the road to Richborough. 1 But neither wall nor marshes saved Durovernum from Hengest's onset, and the town was left in blackened and solitary ruin as the invaders pushed along the road to London. No obstacle seems to have checked their march Battle of from the Stour to the Medway. Passing over the ■ yieso< heights which were crowned with the forest of Blean, they saw the road strike like an arrow past the line of Frodsham Creek through a rich and fer- tile district, where country-houses and farms clus- tered thickly on either side of it, and where the burnt grain which is still found among their ruins may tell of the smoke-track that marked the Jutish advance. 2 As they passed the Swale, however, and 1 Faussett's " Canterbury till Domesday," Archaeol. Journal, xxxii. 378 ; and " Roman Cemeteries in Canterbury," Archseol. Cantiaria, iv. 27. 2 Murray's Kent, p. 70, of remains at Hartlip. 3 34 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. looked to their right over the potteries whose refuse The con- still strews the mud-banks of Upchurch, their march the saxon seems to have swerved abruptly to the south, shore. Whether they were drawn aside by greed of 449-c. 500. plunder — for the Medway valley was then, as now, one of the most fruitful and populous districts of the Caint — or whether they were forced by the guarded walls of the town which is now our Roch- ester ' to turn southward for a ford across the river, the march of the Jutes bent at this point along a ridge of low hills which forms the bound of the river-valley on the east. The country through which it led them was full of memories of a past which had even then faded from the minds of men ; for the hill -slopes which they traversed were the grave-ground of a vanished race, and scattered among the boulders that strewed the soil rose cromlechs and huge barrows of the dead. One mighty relic survives in the monument now called Kit's Coty House, a cromlech which had been linked in old days by an avenue of huge stones to a burial- ground some few miles off near the village of Ad- dington. It was from a steep knoll on which the gray, weather-beaten stones of this monument are reared that the view of their first battle-ground would break on Hengest's warriors ; and a lane which still leads down from it through peaceful home- steads would guide them across the river-valley to a ford which has left its name in the village of Ayles- ford that overhangs it. At this point, which is still the lowest ford across the Medway, and where an 1 See G. T. Clark, " Rochester Castle," Archaeol. Journal, xxxii. 207. ( JUN ?G 'W J THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 35 ancient trackway crossed the river, 1 the British lead- ch ap- t ers must have taken post for the defence of West Thecon- Kent ; but the Chronicle of the conquering people 2 tKaxon tells nothing of the rush that may have carried the Shore- ford, or of the fight that went struggling up through 449-c.500. the village. We hear only that Horsa fell in the moment of victory ; and the flint heap of Horsted which has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valor of which West- minster is the last and noblest shrine. 3 The victory of Aylesford was followed by a politi- Repuhe of cal change among the assailants, whose loose organ- ization around ealdormen was exchanged for a stricter union. Aylesford, we are told, 4 was no sooner won than " Hengest took to the kingdom, and y^lle, his son." The change, no doubt, gave fresh vigor to their attack: and the two kings pushed forward in 457 from the Med way to the conquest of West Kent. Fording the Darent at Dartford, they again met the British forces at the passage of the Cray, a little stream that falls through a quiet valley from the chalk downs hard by at Orpington. Their vic- tory must have been complete, for at its close, as the Chronicle of their conquerors tells us, the Britons " forsook Kent-land and fled with much fear to Lon- don." 5 But the ground Hengest had won seems 1 Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 47. For antiquities of Roman date found in this ford, see Archaeol. Cantiana, i. 174. 2 E. Chron. a. 455. 3 Bseda, Hist. Eccl. lib. i. c. 15 ; and Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 48. 4 E. Chron. a. 455. 5 E. Chron. a. 457. It is possible that the " pagus" or territory of Londinium south of the Thames extended to the Cray, as this was the bound of its citizens' right of chase in the Middle Ages. 36 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. soon to have been won back again. If we trust The con- British tradition, the battle at Crayford was fol- tne saxon lowed by a political revolution in Britain itself, shore. -pj ie over throw of the native leader Vortigern may 449-C.500. h ave proved fatal to his cause ; it would seem, at any rate, that the Romanized Britons rose in revolt under Aurelius Ambrosianus, a descendant of the last Roman general who claimed the purple as an emperor in Britain ; and that the success of Aure- lius drove his rival to the mountains of the west. 1 The revolution revived for a while the energy of the province. Fresh from his triumph over Vortigern, Aurelius marched on the invaders who were turning Kent into a desert, and his advance forced the Jutes to surrender their conquests and to fall back on their stronghold of Thanet. The fortresses of Rich- borough and Reculver, at either mouth of the inlet which parted Thanet from the mainland, still re- mained in British hands, and, basing themselves on the former, the troops of Aurelius seem to have suc- ceeded for some years in prisoning Hengest in his island lair. 2 Rkhbor- Richborouo:h had lono- served as the headquarters of the legion whose business it was to guard the Saxon Shore, and its site was one of great military strength. 3 The mouth of the Wantsum was nar- rowed, as we have seen, by the two jutting sand-spits of Ebbsfleet and Sandwich ; but within these the estuary widened again into a northern and a south- ern bay — the one beneath the slopes of Minster, the 1 Gildas, Hist. sec. 25 ; Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 50. 2 Nennius, sec. 43, 44, 45 ; Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 53.. 3 See map of the district at this time in Archaeol. Cantiana, viii. 14. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 37 other between Sandwich and the little hamlet of chap, i. Fleet. The last bay formed a shallow lagoon, whose The con- oyster-beds were famous in the markets of Rome, tho^axon and a small rise or islet in the midst of it was s ^ e - crowned by the massive walls of Richborough. 449-c.50o. The marble buildings within these walls had served, no doubt, for the residence of the Count of the Saxon Shore. Hard by them stood an amphitheatre for the games of the legionaries, and the hill slope was cov- ered by a town which the fortress protected. Small as was the area of the citadel, its walls were twelve feet thick and nearly thirty feet high, and both faces and angles were strengthened by bastions of solid masonry. 1 Against walls such as these, or those of its sister fortress at Reculver, the unskilled efforts of the Jutes could do little ; and though no attempt seems to have been made to dislodge them from Thanet, the British forces remained strong enough to prison them for some years within the limits of the island. In 465, however, the petty conflicts which had'^j^J^ gone on along the shores of the Wantsum made Caim. way for a decisive struggle. Hengest may have been strengthened by reinforcements from his home land ; while the losses of Aurelius show that he had mustered the whole strength of the island to meet the expected onset. But the overthrow of the Britons at Wipped's-fleet " was so terrible that all hope of preserving the bulk of Kent seems from this 1 See Roach Smith's Antiquities of Richborough, Reculver, and Lymne, for excavations on these sites. 2 E. Chron. a. 465. "There twelve Wealish ealdormen they slew." -g THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. moment to have been abandoned ; and no further The con- struggle disturbed the Jutes in its conquest and set- tle &Lon tlement. It was only along its southern shore that snore. fl\e Britons now held their ground, and we can hard- 449-c.5oo.iy doubt it was the reduction of the fortresses in this quarter which occupied the later years of Hen- gest. 1 Richborough and Reculver must have yield- ed at last to his arms ; the beacon-fire which had so long guided the Roman galleys along the Channel ceased to blaze on the cliffs of Dover; and a final victory of the Jutes in 473 may mark the moment when they reached the rich pastures which the Roman engineers had reclaimed from Romney Marsh. A fortress at Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which they cling over the great flat at their feet, was the key to this district ; and with its fall the work of the first conqueror was done. In this quarter, at least, the resistance of the provincials was utterly broken ; in the last conflict the chronicle of the invaders boasts that the Britons " fled from the English as from fire." 2 Landing With this advance to the mouth of the Weald, the south work of Hen^est's men came to an end; nor did axois. t ^ e j u |- es f rom this time play any important part in the attack on the island, for their after-gains were limited to the Isle of Wight and a few districts on the Southampton Water. Fully, indeed, as the Caint was won, no district was less fitted to serve as a starting-point in any attack on Britain at large. While the Andredsweald, which lay in an impen- etrable mass along its western border, extended 1 Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 54. a E. Chron. a. 473- THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 39 southward behind the swamps of Romney Marsh to chap. i. the coast of the Channel, a morass that stretched Thecon- from the hills of Dulwich to the banks of the the Saxon Thames blocked the narrow strip of open country SIlore - between the northern edge of the Weald and the 449 ^_ 500 - river. The more tempting water-way along the Stanford's Geographical Esiab 1 . Thames itself was barred by the walls, if not by the fortified bridge, of London. The strength of these barriers is proved by the long pause which took place in the advance of the Jutes, for a century was to pass before they made any effort to penetrate further into the island. But their success had called a mightier foe to the work of invasion in the free- 4o THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. booters whose daring and whose ruthlessness were The con- being painted at this moment by the pen of Sido- the Saxon nius. It was pirates of the Saxon race, with Frisians, shore. p er haps, who sailed under their name, 1 whose long 449-c. sop, pillage of the coast from the Wash to the Solent had been preserved in its name of the Saxon Shore. It was certain that the conquests of Hengest would call these rivals to their prey, and the settlement of the Jutes was soon followed by Saxon descents on either side of the Caint. 2 We know best their de- scent to the westward of it. Beyond Romney Marsh along: the Channel the creeks and inlets which break the clay flats to the westward of the Arun offered easy entrance for the boats of the pirates ; and here tradition placed the landing in 477 of Saxon war bands who followed yElle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing, and Cissa. The first gave his name to the landing-place of the pirates in the Selsea peninsula, Cymen's ora or Keynor; while the name of the last is said to be preserved in that of Chichester, a borough that grew up at a later time on the ruins of the little town of Regnum, which must have been the earliest object of this at- tack. Their raid was a successful one ; and after severe losses the Britons of this district fled to the Andredsweald. 3 But the weakness of the invading 1 Procopius, De Bell. Goth. lib. iv. 20, mentions " Frisians " among the three peoples of Britain. 2 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. lib. i. c. 15. 3 E. Chron. a. 477. Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 54. The brief entries of the Chronicle are largely expanded by Henry of Huntingdon, who may have used poems or annals still extant in his time, and whose story here at least falls in with the geographical features of the locality. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 4I force is shown by the slowness with which the CHAp - r - Chronicle of the conquerors pictures ^Elle as fight- The con- ing his way in battle after battle across the streams the^saxon which cleave this strip of coast on their way to the Shore - Channel. 1 It was only after fourteen years of strug- 449-cjoo. gle that the Saxons reached the point where the south downs abut on the sea at Beachy Head, and dipped down in the district that formed the mouth of the Weald — a district guarded by the fortress of Anderida, whose massive walls still cover a rise above the general level of the coast at a spot which under its later name of Pevensey was to witness the landing of a greater conqueror in William the Norman. The siege of Anderida proved a long and a diffi- Anderida. cult one. Eastward of the fortress the ground lifts slowly towards our Hastings, where a sandstone ridge abuts upon the sea. This Forest-ridge, as it is called, is, in fact, the termination of a low rise which forms a water-parting through the whole length of the Weald, and which throws down the streams of the Weald to north and south by channels that they have hewn in the chalk downs on either side of it. Then, as now, the ground was covered with wood- land and copses ; but under the Roman rule the life of this district presented a striking contrast to the solitude and silence of the rest of the Andredsweald. 2 Hid in its wooded gorges we find traces of a busy population of miners — the small round pits from which the nodules of their ore were dug, rude smelt- 1 E. Chron. a. 485, for the fight at Mearcredsburn. 2 See Wright's description of Pevensey in his Wanderings of an Antiquary. , 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. ing-furnaces on the hill-slope, big cinder-heaps cov- The con- ered nowadays with oak and elm. It must have thesaxon been the attacks of these miners that made the task shore. £ t } ie besiegers so hard a one. If we may trust the 449-c. sop, tradition of a later time, 1 the Britons swarmed like bees round the English lines, assailing them by night, and withdrawing at dawn to the gorges of the Forest-ridge, where they lay in ambush for the parties that attacked them. An attempt to storm the town would at once draw the miners on the rear of its assailants ; and when the besiegers, galled by the storm of arrows and javelins, turned from their task to encounter these foes, the Britons drew back to their fastnesses in the Weald. It was not till ^Elle was strong enough to detach a part of his force to cover the siege that the resistance of the town came to an end. The terrible words of the Chronicle tell the story of its fall : the English " slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left." 2 The work of slaughter, we can hardly doubt, was soon completed by the attack and con- quest of the brave iron-workers who had failed to avert the doom of Anderida ; and from that time to the days of the Edwards no sound of quarryman or forge was heard in the gorges of the Forest-ridge. Bignor. q£ £} ie victories or settlement of the Saxons along the coast from Chichester to Pevensey we know lit- tle or nothing. Nowhere, indeed, was the land richer 1 Huntingdon, Hist. Angl. (ed. T. Arnold), p. 45. 2 E. Chron. a. 491. Huntingdon adds, " Ita urbem destruxerunt quod nunquam postea re-edificata est : locus tantum quasi nobilis- simse urbis transeuntibus ostenditur desolatus " (?'. e. in the twelfth century), Hist. Angl. (ed. Arnold), p. 45. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. A * in plunder ; for the coast had been occupied by the chap. i. Romans from the date of their first settlement in The con- Britain, and the country side was dotted with the the Saxon homes of the wealthier provincials. A country- shore - house such as that whose remains have been dis- 449 - c - 500 - covered at Bignor, a few miles from Chichester, lights up for us the social life which was swept away by the Saxon sword. 1 The household build- ings of this mansion formed a court more than a hundred feet square, round the inner side of which ran a covered colonnade, with a tessellated pavement arranged in fanciful patterns. Within the house it- self the hall with its central fountain preserved the southern type of domestic building that the Roman builders brought from their sunnier land, as the fur- nace which heated the floor of the banqueting-room behind showed the ingenuity with which they ac- commodated themselves to the needs of a sterner climate. The walls of the larger rooms glowed with frescoes, fragments of which retain much of their original vividness of color, while their floors were of elaborate and costly mosaic -work. Figures of dancing nymphs filled the compartments of one chamber, a picture of the rape of Ganymedes formed the centre of another, a third was gay with pictures of the Seasons or of gladiatorial games, where Cupids sported as retiarii and secutores of the amphitheatre. But no traces remain of the line of low huts which here, as elsewhere, no doubt, leaned against the outer wall that girt in the circuit of buildings — huts which housed the serfs who tilled the lands of their owner, 1 Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, p. 243. There is a fuller description in his Wanderings of an Antiquary. .. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. and whose squalor, in its dark contrast with the The con- comfort and splendor of the mansion itself, would thesaxon nave painted better for us than a thousand passages shore. f r0 m law or chronicle the union of material wealth 449-c. 500. w ith social degradation that lay like a dark shadow over the Roman world. Landing Dimly as we trace this winning of the southeast- East Sax- ern coast by the men who were afterwards known as ons ' the Sussex or South Saxons, we pass as from light into darkness when we turn to the work of another Saxon tribe who must at about the same time have been conquering and settling on the other side of the Caint, to the north of the estuary of the Thames. 1 In the utter lack of any written record of the strug- gle in this quarter, we can only collect stray glimpses of its story from the geographical features of this district and from its local names. From both these sets of facts we are drawn to the conclusion that it was not from the Thames that this district was mainly attacked. In that quarter there was little to tempt an invader. The clay flats which stretch along- the coast of Southern Essex were then but a fringe of fever-smitten and desolate fens, while the meadows that rise from them to the west were part of a forest tract that extended to the marshes of the Lea. The whole region, indeed, beyond the coast 1 Huntingdon (Hist. Angl. ed. Arnold, p. 49) names as the first East-Saxon king, Ercenwine (or, as Florence calls him, ^Escwine), whose son and successor, Sleda, married the sister of ^Ethelberht of Kent. As the usage elsewhere was for the conquerors to gather into a kingdom some time after their first conquest, this would bring the landing in Essex to about the time of the landing in Sus- sex, which is of itself probable enough. Malmesbury makes Sleda their first king (Gest. Reg. ed. Hardy, lib. i. sec. 98). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. ac was thick with woodland. In the Middle Ages all chap. i. Essex lay within the bounds of the royal forest ; The con- and its timber church-towers and log-framed home- tJe saxon steads still recall its wealth of wood. To the north- SIlore - ward, however, the country became somewhat clearer ; 449-c.50o. and here a tempting inlet offered itself in the estuary where the waters of the Chelm and the Stour found a common passage to the sea, and where Camulo- dunum offered a city to sack. 1 The town stood, like its successor, Colchester, on a steep rise or "dun," round whose northern and eastern sides bent the river Colne. Camulodunum was the oldest of the Roman settlements in Britain : temples and public buildings had already risen, indeed, within its bounds when the revolt under Boadicea broke the course of Roman conquest. Its size and massive walls' 2 prove it to have become in later days one of the busiest and wealthiest towns of the province ; and from the after-settlement of its foes we may probably gather that the district beneath its sway spread northward as far as the Stour. It was in the valleys of the Colne and Stour that Their the East Saxons, as these warriors came to be called, ries. seem mainly to have settled after the fall of Camulo- dunum. But here, as in their other conquest in the south, the settlement of the Saxons was small and unimportant. Neither tract, indeed, was large or fruitful enough to draw to it any great mass of the 1 For Camulodunum, see map in Markham's Life of Fairfax, p. 309, etc., and Freeman, Archaeol. Journal, xxxiv. 47. 2 The circuit is more perfect than anywhere else in Britain ; but the walls themselves have been reconstructed in later days. Free- man, Archseol. Journal, xxxiv. 55. The museum of the town is rich in Roman relics. 4 6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. conquerors, while from neither was it easy to push The con- across their bounds into more fertile districts. As the saxon the South Saxons were prisoned within their nar- shore " row strip of coast by the reaches of the Andreds- 449 ~ c - 500 - weald, so the East Saxons found themselves as ef- fectually barred from any advance into the island Stanford* Geographical Eatab. by a chain of dense woodlands, the Waltham Chace of later ages, whose scanty relics have left hardly more than the names of Epping and Hainault for- ests. These woodlands, which stretched at this time in a dense belt on either side the Roding along the western border of the district that the invaders had THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 47 won from the Thames to the open downs above chart. Saffron Walden, and were backed to the west by The con- the marshy valley of the Lea, whose waters widened the e saxon into an estuary as it reached the Thames, seem to s ^°i e - have been wholly uninhabited, for no trace remains 449-c.500. in their area of military stations or of the country- houses or burial-places of the provincials. How im- passable, in fact, these fastnesses had been found by the Romans is clear from the fact that even their road -makers never attempted to penetrate them. The lower portion of the Ermine Street, the road to the north, which in later days struck direct through this district from London to Huntingdon, did not exist in Roman times, and the British provincial was forced to make a circuit either by Leicester or Col- chester on his way to Lincoln and York. 1 This double barrier to the west proved formidable Landing of the enough to hold the invaders at bay for almost a Engie. hundred years. But to the northward no such bar- rier hindered the East Saxons from sharing in a fight that must have been going on at this time in the chalk uplands which rose to the north of them across the Stour. It is in this district that we first meet with a third race of conquerors, whose work was to be of even greater moment in our history than that of Saxon or Jute. The men who were to spread along the Yare and the Orwell, and to march in triumph through the massive gate which recalls the strength of Roman Lincoln, whose work it was to colonize Mid-Britain and the line of the Trent, as well as to win for their own the vast regions be- 1 Guest, " Four Roman Ways," Archaeol. Journal, xiv. 1 16. 4 8 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. Ende. chap. i. tween the Firth of Forth and the Humber, were The con- drawn from a tribe whose name was destined to ab- t£e saxon sorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on shore, £] ie p e0 pi e which sprang from the union of the con- 449-C.500. querors of Britain, as on the land which they won. 1 These were the Engle, or Englishmen. The bulk of the tribes who then bore this name, if in the dark- ness of their early history they have been rightly traced by modern research, lay probably along the middle Elbe, in the country about Magdeburg ; while fragments of the same race were found on the Weser, in what is now known as Lower Hanover and Olden- burg, and in the peninsula which juts from the shores of North Germany to part the Baltic and the North- ern Seas. 2 Tiu East It is in the heart of this peninsula that we still find the district which preserves their name of Angeln, or the Engleland ; and, from the desert state of this dis- trict as men saw it hundreds of years afterwards, 3 it would seem that, unlike their Saxon neighbors, the bulk of whom remained in their own homesteads, the whole Engle people forsook their earlier seats for the soil of Britain. Such a transfer would account for the wide area of their conquests. Of their inva- sion or settlement no chronicle has come down to us ; 4 but their first descents seem to have been aimed 1 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 15. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 45. 3 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 15. 4 Of the conquest of East Anglia, Lincolnshire, the Fen-land, Mid- Britain, and Yorkshire, we have no record, either on the part of conquered or conquerors. In Northumbria the Chronicle tells only the fact of Ida's elevation to the kingship and seizure of Bam- borough ; while Nennius preserves a faint tradition of some of the earlier conflicts. We are forced, therefore, to fall back on the in- THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 49 against the upland into which the northernmost chart. chalk-rises that diverge from the Berkshire Downs The con- widen as they reach the sea. This tract, which tJesaam comprises our present shires of Norfolk and Suf- shore - folk, had drawn settlers to it from the earliest times 449-C.500. of British history. It had been the seat of the Iceni, the most powerful of the tribes among whom the island had been parted before the Roman rule, and whose name, like that of the " Gwent " in which they lived, was preserved in a Venta Icenorum that was the predecessor of our Norwich. The downs which form its western portion were, for the most part, stretches of heath and pasture, over which wan- dered huge flocks of bustards ; but in the river- courses that break through the levels of clay and gravel between these downs and the sea, population and wealth had grown steadily through the ages of Roman rule ; and the importance of the country was shown by the care with which the provincial admin- istration had guarded its coast. The district formed, in fact, the last unconquered Their remnant of the Saxon Shore. But only their ruins conques s ' tell us of the fall of its strongholds — of Brancaster on the shore of the Wash, or of Garianonum at the mouth of the Yare ; while not even its ruins remain to tell of the fall of Venta Icenorum, or of the con- quest of the district that lay around it. # All we learn from the scanty record of later days is that the as- sailants of this region came direct from the German shores ; that their attacks were " many and oft ;" and dications given us by archaeology and by the physical character of the ground itself in attempting a rough sketch of the English advance. tjO THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. that countless strifes between these little parties and The con- the ealdormen who headed them broke their war tKaxon against the British. 1 From the size of the later shore. nunc ireds we ma y perhaps gather that the conquerors 449-c. 500. settled thickly over the soil, 2 while their local names 'lead us to believe that offshoots from the Saxon houses who were conquering on the Colne joined the Engle in their attack on the Gwent. 3 The very designations of Norfolk and Suffolk tell how one folk of the conquerors fought its way inland from the estuary at Yarmouth up the valleys of the Ouse, the Wensum, the Yare, and the Waveney to the northern half of the upland, while another and a lesser folk struck up from the common mouth of the Orwell and the Stour to the southern downs. 4 Norwich, no doubt, formed the central settlement of 1 Huntingdon, Hist. Angl. (ed. Arnold), p. 48. " Ea tempestate venerunt multi et saepe de Germania, et occupaverunt East-Angle et Merce ; sed necdum sub uno rege redacta erant. Plures autem proceres certatim regiones occupabant, unde innumerabilia bella fiebant : proceres vero, quia multi erant, nomine carent." 2 One Norfolk hundred, that of Humbleyard, contains less than 23,000 acres, or less than many single townships in Yorkshire or Lancashire. 3 See lists in Kemble, Saxons in England, i. 456, etc. * Flor. Wore. ed. Thorpe (i. 260), in one of the appendices to his work, fixes approximately the date of this conquest : " Regno poste- rius Cant-wariorum, et prius regno Occidentalium Saxonum, exor- tum est regnum Orientalium Anglorum," z. e. its " kingdom " was set up between 455 and 519. Baeda, speaking of Rsedwald, who was king of the East Angles at the close of the sixth century, calls him " filius Tytili, cujus pater fuit Vuffa, a quo reges Orientalium Anglorum Vuffingas appellant" (Hist. Eccl. ii. 15). If Uffa was the first king, the beginning of the kingdom cannot be thrown much further back than the latter date of 519 ; and as we must allow for a period of isolated conquests and anarchy before this date, the first descents of the East Engle cannot be far from the time at which we have placed them. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 51 the one folk, as Sudbury may have formed that of chap. i. the other; and though there are enough common Thecon- names among each to show what their after-history t 2e sa«m implies — that there was no deep severance between Shore - them- — the far sfreater number of local desicrnations 449 - - 500 - which are peculiar to either district 1 points to a real individuality in the " folks " who conquered them. From the downs the conquerors again pushed inland to the flats at their feet, and the vale ' of the little Ouse was included in their territory. But they can- not have been vigorous assailants of the towns about the Wash, if the rampart which runs across New- market Heath from Rech to Cowledge was, as is possible, their work. 2 The Devil's Dyke, as this barrier is called, is clearly a work of defence against enemies advancing from the Fens ; and as a defence to the East Anglians it was of priceless value, for, stretching as it did from a point where the country became fenny and impassable to a point where the woods equally forbade all access, it covered the only entrance into the country they had won. But if the dyke be a work of the conquerors of this part of the coast, its purely defensive character shows that their attack was at an end ; and that it was rather as as- sailants than as a prey that they regarded the towns of Central Britain. But even if the invaders were forced to halt at Saxon 1 • r 1 • i 1 r 1 S' l0re con - this stage 01 their advance, they were now firmly quered. 1 See the lists in Kemble, Saxons in England, vol. i. p. 456. 2 Its ditch faces towards Cambridgeshire and the Fens (Camden's Britannia, 1753, vol. i. p. 487). It was the boundary of the kingdom as well as of the diocese of East Anglia. The name is probably a Christian version of Woden's Dyke, or Wansdyke. ^ 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. i. planted on British soil. With the settlement of The con- East Anglia the conquest of the Saxon Shore was tSe saxon complete, and the whole coast of Britain from the shore. Wash to Southampton Water was in the hands of 449-C.500. the invader. Its fortresses were broken down. Its towns were burned and desolate. A new people was planted on its soil. Even if we look on the dates given by English tradition as at best approxi- mations to the truth, they can hardly be wrong when they point out this district as having been the first to be won, and as having taken long years in the winning. It is, indeed, the slow progress of the in- vaders, and the bitterness which would naturally spring from so protracted a struggle, that best ac- counts for the differences which even a casual ex- amination of the map discloses between the settle- ment of the conquerors here and their settlement in Central or Northern Britain ; for nowhere is the Eng- lish settlement so thick, nowhere do we find the tribal houses so crowded on the soil, or the hun- dreds, in which the settlers grouped themselves, so small and so thickly clustered. 1 1 Kemble, in his Saxons in England, pointed out that the hun- dreds along the coast — which he regarded as representing the set- tlements of the free settlers — were smaller and thicker than those of the interior ; and as regards the Saxon Shore, this is true enough. Elsewhere it does not apply in the same degree ; and Professor Stubbs urges that " Gloucester and Wiltshire are as minutely sub- divided as Devonshire and Dorsetshire" (Const. Hist. i. 113, note). But this hardly tells against the identification of the smaller hun- dreds with the earlier settlements — as Devon and Dorset are, like Gloucestershire, among later conquests — or against the truth of Kemble 's statement if it be restricted to the Saxon Shore. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 53 CHAPTER II. CONQUESTS OF THE ENGLE. c. ^oo-c. 570. To the province the loss of the Saxon Shore must Barriers have been a terrible loss; for with its conquest" Britain was cut off from the continent, she was isolated from the rest of the civilized world, and a fresh impulse must have been given to the anarchy that had begun in the strife of her Romanized and Celtic populations. But greatly as it might weaken Britain, the loss of this tract was far from throwing her open to the invaders. We have seen what bar- riers held back the Jute of Kent, and the Saxon on either side of him; but barriers as impassable held back the Engle of the Eastern Gwent, for the forest line which began on the Thames reached on along their western frontier to the Wash, and the Wash stretched to the northward from Newmarket to the sea. The Fens, which occupied this huge break in the eastern coast of Britain, covered in the sixth century a far larger space than now ;' for while they stretched northward up the Witham almost as far as Lincoln, and southward up the Cam as far as Cambridge, they reached inland to Huntingdon and Stamford, and the road between those places skirted 1 Pearson's Historical Maps of England, p. 3; and map of Bri- tannia Romana. 54 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. their bounds to the west. So vast a reach of tangled conquests marsh offered few temptations to an invader ; and we Engie! shall see grounds at a later time for believing that the c "500- Gyrwas, as the Engle freebooters who found a home c.j>70. m its islands called themselves, were for a long time too weak to break through the line of towns that guarded its inner border. Conquest Had the invaders pushed inland only from this ofLmdsey. x . quarter, tnerelore, the resistance ot the Britons might have succeeded in prisoning them within the bounds of the Saxon Shore, as that of Gaul at a later day prisoned the Northmen within the bounds of Nor- mandy. But the sixth century can hardly have been long begun when each of the two peoples who had done the main work of conquest opened a fresh at- tack on the flanks of the tract they had won. On its western flank, as we shall see, the Saxons appeared in the Southampton Water. On its northern flank the Engle appeared in the estuaries of the Forth and of the H umber. To the south of this last great opening in the coast the oolitic range that stretch- es across Mid-Britain from the Cotswolds through Northamptonshire abuts on the waters of the river- mouth ; while to the east of the oolites, across the muddy stream of the Ancholme, rises a parallel line of chalk heights, cut off from the chalk upland of East Anglia by the Wash. As it extends to the south the oolitic range is broken by a deep depres- sion through which the Witham makes its way to the Wash ; and to the south of the Witham, over the country which is now known as Kesteven, 1 a 1 Camden, Britannia (ed. 1753), vol. i. p. 554. See Camden's map of Lincolnshire. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 55 mass of dense woodland stretched from the fen- chap, h. country about Boston across the heights into the conquests basin of the Trent. The two uplands, however, Jngie. which lay to the north of this wold tract formed c "^" even then a populous and fertile part of Britain. c - 57 °- Roman industry had begun the work of draining its marshes ; its long reaches of heath were already broken with farms and homesteads ; and the houses which lay dotted over the country side show by the character of their ruins that its landowners were men of wealth and culture. The Ermine Street from the south struck like an arrow from Stamford through the woods of Kesteven along the crest of the heights, to drop suddenly into the valley of the Witham as it breaks through them ; and, uniting with the Fosse Road from the Trent valley as it crossed the river, again climbed the steep slope on the other side of the gap, over which streams now- adays, in picturesque confusion, the modern city of London. At the edge of the table-land to which this ascent leads, on a site marked by the minster and castle that now tower over the city, stood the square fortress of the first Roman Lindum ; and through this earlier town the road struck by the Portway Gate, which is still left to us, straight on- ward to the upland without its walls. Here, as else- where, however, the growth of the place had brought about an extension of its defences ; a fortified sub- urb spread down the hill in the line of the modern Lincoln to the stream which even then furnished an important inlet for the coasting trade of Central Britain ; and since the close of the Roman rule the citizens seemed to have striven to strengthen their 56 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. walls by raising a line of earthworks to the north of. conquests the town. 1 But growth and commerce were alike Engfe! brought to an end by the storm which fell on them ; c loo- an< ^ town and suburb must have been left a heap of c. 570. ruins while their conquerors spread over the deserted country north of the Witham, and settled down in croft and homestead as the Lindiswara, the " dwellers about Lindum." 2 The The conquest of Lindsey, however, brought the Wolds" Engle little save plunder. The estuary of the Hum- ber, with a huge swamp that spread along the bed of the lower Trent, and of which a portion remains in the Isle of Axholme, girt these uplands in on the north and northwest; while over the whole of the modern shire south of the Witham, from Lincoln to Stamford, stretched the thick woods of Kesteven, and the Holland of the Fens. It was only along the Fosse Road from Lincoln to Newark that the country was open for an advance ; and along this the Lindis- wara may have crept slowly to the Trent. But it was the effort of another tribe of conquerors that brought the Engle fairly into the heart of Britain. While the assailants of Lindsey had been striking from the H umber over the heights and wolds on the south of its estuary, other Engle adventurers must have been seizing the flat promontory or naze at the mouth of the Humber, to which they gave the name of Holderness. Fertile as drainage has now made 1 See G. T. Clark, " Lincoln Castle," Archaeol. Journal, xxxiii. 213 ; Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv. 212. 2 We have no means of dating the settlement of the Lindiswara ; but we can hardly be wrong in placing it between that of the East Engle and the Deirans. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 57 this district, it can then have been little more than a char n. narrow line of mud flats, which offered small temp- conquests tation for settlement. But across the stream of the E ng i e e Hull, in whose marshy and desolate channels men c ~^ _ hunted the beaver which gave its name to our Bev- c - 57 °- erley, the ground rises gently to a crescent of chalk MI D BRITAIN Roman names LIN DUN! English „ EOFOBW/C Modern „ Lichfield English Miles- Stanford^ Geographical Kstabi downs, the wolds that run from the Humber by Mar- ket-Weighton to the cliffs of Flamborough Head. Though dykes and gravel mounds scar their surface, the want of water would have always prevented any settlement on these wolds ; they must have been at this time mere sheepwalks, as they remained till eg THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. half a century ago, and could be easily overrun by conquests the invader. The wolds, however, were hardly mas- Engie! tered when their conquerors looked on a richer and c ~ more tempting country. To north and to west the c 570. chalk heights plunge abruptly down steep slopes of scanty turf to a plain at their feet, through which the stream of the Derwent bends from its rise beside the sea on the east to pour its waters into the H um- ber. The springs that break from the base of the cliffs make the lower Derwent vale a rich and fertile country; and here, as the local names show, the houses of the conquerors — the Deirans, as they came to call themselves — were thickly planted. The dis- trict about Weighton seems to have been chosen as the sacred ground of their settlement; and a temple of their gods is said by local tradition to have stood in the village of Goodmanham. 1 On the north, the narrower space of the upper vale forced them to hug the heights more closely ; though the fall of Derven- tio, which lay probably on the site of Malton, would open to them the country round it, where their kings in later days found a favorite home. 2 Holderness, the wolds, and the valley of the Derwent now form the East Riding of Yorkshire ; and it is likely enough that this local division preserves, however roughly, the boundaries of the earlier kingdom of the Deirans. Eboracum. But they were soon drawn onward. Beyond the green meadows at the feet of the wolds stretched away to the westward and the northward one of the . richest and most fertile regions in Britain. Country- 1 The site of the temple was shown in Baeda's day (Hist. Eccl. ii. 13). 2 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. ii. 9. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 59 houses of rich landowners studded thickly the tract char ir. of red marls that spreads along the Wharfe and the conquests Ouse; and in the midst of this level stood the city Engie! of York, or Eboracum, 1 once the capital of Britain. c- ~^~ _ The town lay on a tongue of land between the broad c - 57 °- channel of the Ouse and the bed of a lesser stream, the Fosse, which came through a marshy and difficult country from the woodlands beneath the wolds. To the military importance and strength of its position was doubtless due the existence of the camp whose limits are still marked by the small square of mas- sive walls that enclosed in Trajan's day the earlier Roman city. 2 But the town soon overleaped these bounds. Placed as it was at the head of the tidal waters of the Ouse, and forming the natural centre of Northern Britain, it became under Severus the seat of the provincial government and the headquarters of the force which guarded Britain against the Picts. Before the close of the Roman rule, it covered the whole area of the modern city on either side of the Ouse, while beyond it lay suburbs a mile in length 1 Phillips (Archaeol. Journal, vol. x. p. 183) infers from a study of roads, etc., that " Eboracum was not situated on the earliest track of the middle road to the north. That track, in fact, went from near Tadcaster to Aldborough, leaving York ten miles to the right. But at the epoch of the Antonine Itinerary the direct route was aban- doned, and the deviation through Eboracum substituted." Free- man, Norman Conquest, iv. 202, and Raine, Historians of the Church of York, i. praef. (Rolls series), throw light on the early topography of York, whose Roman antiquities may be studied in the Ebora- cum of Drake and the Eburacum of Wellbeloved. 2 A broken tablet in the York Museum, which tells of work done by the ninth legion in Trajan's day, is the earliest monument of Eboracum. Another, of a Decurio, shows the form taken by its municipal administration. 6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. and roads lined with tombs. 1 As the dwelling-place conquests of the Caesar Constantius, York became for a while Engil one °f the Imperial cities of the Empire. It was yet c 500- more illustrious as the birthplace of Constantine, and c. 570. as the spot from which he started on that wonderful career which changed the face of the world. The work of Constantine left its traces on Eboracum, as on the rest of the Empire ; its bishop took his place beside the Imperial vicar; and the shrines of Sera- pis and Mithras, which were frequent in the older city, were superseded by a Christian basilica. With the departure of the Roman administration, however, and with the inroads of the Pict, the glory of the city passed away; but it remained a strong and wealthy place — the head, it may be, of a confederacy of the neighboring cities to which its high-roads led ; and the marks of its greatness survived in the lofty walls 2 1 The wealthier class of burghers and officials are found buried along the road to Calcaria or Tadcaster. It is from these tombs that the relics of Roman life preserved at York have mostly been drawn, fragments of the fine Samian ware brought for rich citizens' use from the Continent, curious egg-shell pottery, vases and cups from a woman's toilet-case, sepulchral figures of soldiers and citi- zens, and the like. On the right bank of the Ouse, at a short dis- tance to the right of the road to Calcaria, was discovered, in 1873 (Murray's Yorkshire, p. 70), a "cemetery for a poorer class than that which raised its monuments nearer to the great road, and for some distance along its course. In some parts of the ground Roman carters had been in the habit of shooting rubbish from the neigh- boring city. There were thick strata of Roman bricks, mortar, and pottery, mingled with fragments of wall plaster, on which colored patterns were distinct. Adjoining this rougher portion of the cem- etery two or three deep pits, or putei,were found, into which, as was usual, the bodies of slaves had been thrown carelessly and pell- mell, as was evident from the confused mass of bones in all possible positions." 2 One noble fragment of its wall survives in a bastion, cased with THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 6 1 and towers which awed Alcuin two centuries later, chap.ii. as well as in the " proofs of Roman refinement " that conquests were still visible in the days of William of Malmes- Jngie. bury. 1 c ."^o- In the century that had passed since the close of c - 57 °- the Roman rule, York had probably felt the need of Conquest additional defence ; and modern inquiry has detect- Yorkshire. ed the work of its citizens in the mound of earth which encloses the modern city and which serves as a base for its later wall. 2 But the effort proved a fruitless one, and after a struggle whose incidents are lost for us, the town, like its neighbor cities, lay a desolate ruin, while its conquerors spread, slaying and burning, along the valley of the Ouse. 3 Along its southern course, indeed, there was little worth the winning. The moorlands that lie close to York on the west run onward to the Peak of Derbyshire in a wild region of tumbled hills, traversed but by a few pack-roads, 4 a region which formed a British king- dom that for a hundred years to come defied the arms of the invaders ; 5 and though these moorlands neat masonry of .small ashlar blocks, which are broken by a line of red brick. The tower is embowered nowadays in greenery, and gay with flowers. From its base the ground falls in steep slopes to the river, lying deep in what is still a green ravine. This tower stood at the southwest angle of the Roman city. 1 Raine, Historians of the Church of York, i. praef. xiii., who adds, " In no other Roman city in Britain have remains of equal number and importance been discovered " (xv.). 2 G. T. Clark, "The Defences of York," Archgeol. Journal, vol. xxxi. p. 232. 3 " Every Roman station and house in the north shows traces of having been destroyed by fire" (Raine, Historians of the Church of York, i. praef. xvii.). * Phillips traces and examines these. Archaeol. Journal, vol. x. p. 181. 5 This district answers roughly to the present West Riding. 6 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. of Elmet sheer away from the Ouse as it passes to conquests the Humber, the broadening level which stretched Engl?, along its lower course, as along the lower channels ~ of the Wharfe, the Aire, and the Don that come c. 500- c 570. down to it from the moors, was then a wild waste of oak forest and fen. 1 Through this tract, in the nar- row strip of open tillage between the marshes and the edge of Elmet, ran the one road which led from Central Britain to the plain of York, crossing the Don at Doncaster and its two fellow-rivers at Cas- tleford and at Tadcaster, where it bent sharply aside to Eboracum. The fall of these cities must have accompanied the conquest of this district, but the towns seem to have been small, and, save at Calcaria, the country would furnish small room for settlement. North of York, as the road crossed the Don and struck up the Swale by Catterick 2 to the Tees, a fairer and wider tract opened before the invaders, and the peasants of Aldborough show on the floor- ing of their cottages mosaic pavements that bear witness to the luxury and refinement which passed away in the wreck of Isurium. 3 It was along this 1 This was the district of Hatfield Chase, a northern outlier of the great fen through which the Trent made its way to the Humber. 2 Cataractonium seems from its remains to have been little more than a small walled station, from which the northern road struck across the desolate moors to the wall, while a side-track ran north- westward to Lavatrse, or Bowes, in Cumberland. 3 Isurium can have been little inferior to York in size or wealth. As the forest of Galtres blocked all passage eastward of the Ouse, it was by the western bank of the river that the main road struck to the north across the lower channel of the Nidd and the passage over the Ure at Isurium. As commanding this passage, Isurium was a military point of some importance, but it was also important as the point of junction of this great northern main road with a road which came from the vale of Malton and Derwent to the east, THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 5, central plain, however, that the Deirans could alone chap. h. find booty. The cliff-like face of the Hambleton conquests Hills, towering over a forest ' that extended along the Engie. Ouse on its eastern bank just above York, guarded c ~^ _ moorlands which stretched from the vale of Der- c - 57 °- went to that of the Tees ; and it was only along the little stream-courses which ran down to the vale of Pickering, or in the openings which break the line of its coast, that the Engle can have settled in the lonely wilds which they named " Cliff-land," or Cleve- land. Nor can their settlements have been thicker in the moorlands that fronted them on the north- west. The border line of Yorkshire still marks the furthest bounds to which they drove the Britons as they won their way up Wharfedale, or traversed the wide dip of Ribblesdale, or pushed across broad past- ures and through primeval woods that sheltered the skirting the northern edge of Galtres forest, along the slopes of the Hambleton Hills, as with a second which came directly from Tad- caster and the south, and a third which came from Ilkley and the western moors. The rude masses of gritstone, some twenty feet high, which stand in the fields hard by, and are here known as the " Devil's Arrows," suggest an equal importance in yet earlier ages, as do possibly the large round mounds that stand outside the city walls, and one of which still remains. From the existing traces of foundations, the city must have been a closely packed mass of nar- row lanes. " Traces of fire," we are told, " are still visible on parts of the walls." 1 The later forest of Galtres formed a relic of this woodland. Even in the Middle Ages Galtres extended from the walls of York as far northward as Easingwold and Craik, and as far eastward as Castle-Howard. In Leland's day the part of the forest between Castle-Hutton and York was, near York itself, " moorish and low ground, and having little wood, in the other part higher and reason- ably wooded." It then abounded in wild deer. So lonely was the waste north of York that travellers often lost their way when mak- ing for the city. 6 4 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. char ii. wo lf and the wild white oxen over the gap of Stain- conquests more along the road from Catterick to Carlisle. 1 Engie! If history tells us nothing of the victories that laid c loo- this great district at the feet of its conquerors, the C.JS70. spade of the archaeologist has done somewhat to re- The veal the ruin and misery of the conquered people. Britom. The caves of the Yorkshire moorlands preserve traces of the miserable fugitives who fled to them for shelter. Such a cave opens on the side of a lonely ravine, known now as the King's Scaur, high up in the moors beside Settle. 2 In primeval ages it had been a haunt of hyenas, who dragged thither the mammoths, the reindeer, the bisons, and the bears that prowled in the neighboring glens. At a later time it became a home of savages, whose stone adzes and flint knives and bone harpoons are still embed- ded in its floor. But these, too, vanished in their turn, and this haunt of primitive man lay lonely and undisturbed till the sword of the English invaders drove the Roman provincials for shelter to the Moors. The hurry of their flight may be gathered from the relics their cave-life has left behind it. There was clearly little time to do more than to drive off the cattle, the swine, the goats, whose bones 1 The story of a flight of an " Archbishop Sampson " from York on its fall, about a.d. 500, to Brittany is simply an invention of the twelfth century, and part of the struggle of the church of Dol against the claims of the see of Tours (Stubbs and Haddan, Coun- cils of Great Britain, i. 149, note). But the date of the fall of York may be fairly accurate. The first king of the Deirans was JEWa., the son of Yffi, whose reign began in 559 (Flor. Wore. ed. Thorpe, i. 268) ; and we may therefore probably date their invasion as going • on during the forty or fifty years before that time. 2 Boyd Dawkins, Cave - hunting, pp. 81-125, has given a full ac- count of the series of remains found in this cave. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 65 lie scattered round the hearth fire at the mouth of chap, n. the cave, where they served the wretched fugitives conquests for food. The women must have buckled hastily Eng i e . their brooches of bronze or party-colored enamel, c ^ _ the peculiar workmanship of Celtic Britain, and c - 570 - snatched up a few household implements as they hurried away. The men, no doubt, girded on as hastily the swords whose dainty sword-hilts of ivory and bronze still remain to tell the tale of their doom, and, hiding in their breast what money the house contained, from coins of Trajan to the wretched " minims " that told of the Empire's decay, mounted their horses to protect their flight. At nightfall all were crouching beneath the dripping roof of the cave, or round the fire that was blazing at its mouth, and a long suffering began in which the fugitives lost year by year the memory of the civilization from which they came. A few charred bones show how hunger drove them to slay their horses for food ; reddened pebbles mark the hour when the new ves- sels they wrought were too weak to stand the fire, and their meal was cooked by dropping heated stones into the pot. A time seems to have come when their very spindles were exhausted, and the women who wove in that dark retreat made spindle whorls as they could from the bones that lay about them. While the Engle were thus mastering the future Northern Yorkshire from the estuary of the H umber, they were making an even more important settlement in the estuary of the Forth. No district of Britain had been the scene of so long a conflict as the country between the Firth of Forth and the Tyne. Through- 5 66 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. out the period of the Roman rule, this border had congests been a battle - ground. The Roman conquest of Engi*. Southern Britain, indeed, was hardly completed when ~ the pressure of the unconquered tribes to the north c. 570. forced Hadrian to guard the province by a barrier drawn right across this tract of country. 1 A massive wall, backed to the south by an earthen rampart and a ditch, and strengthened by military stations and watch-towers along its course, stretched for seventy miles across the wild moorlands between the thin strips of cultivated ground which then lined the mouth of the Solway or the Tyne. Nothing gives a livelier picture of Roman Britain on its military side than the remains of this wall and the monuments we find among its ruins. With the departure, however, of the legion that garrisoned this barrier, its whole line must have been left desolate. The towns in its course were merely military stations, which could contribute nothing to its defence when the garrison was withdrawn, and which would be left as deserted as the wall itself. The ground which it traversed, indeed, was, for the most part, a waste that could furnish few supplies for its inhabitants ; and the troops and camp-followers who held the barrier must have been provided with food and supplies from the headquarters at Eboracum. Even had a national force been ready to take the place of the legions, the maintenance of such a garrison involved an organization and expense which can hardly have been possible for the broken province ; and the great barrier probably sank at once into solitude 1 Dr. Collingwood Bruce has summed up all we know of this bar- rier in his volume on The Roman Wall. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 6 7 and ruin, while the Picts poured unmolested into the chap. n. country which it guarded. Marks of their havoc conquests may perhaps still be traced in the station that occu- E ng i e e pied the site of Maryport to the south of Carlisle, c "^_ amidst whose ruins we find a tower -orate broken c -5?o. o down by violence, and the houses of its main street charred with fire. 1 Further south at Ribchester, on the Ribble, among the burnt wreck of the town, have been found skeletons of men who may have made their last stand against the savage marauders. Raids such as those of the Picts, however, destruc- Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, p. 452. 68 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. tive as they must have been, were but passing inci- conquests dents in the life of Northern Britain ; for, like the Engie. later Highlander, the Pict seems to have gathered c ^oo- n * s booty only to withdraw with it to his native hills ; c. 570. an d on the western coast, which was mainly subject The Engie to their incursions, the Britons maintained their polit- Northem ical existence for centuries to come. A far greater Bntam. cnan g e was wrought by the marauders who assailed this region from its eastern coast. It is possible that descents from North Germany had long since plant- ed Frisian settlers in the valley of the Tweed, and that it is to their descents that the Firth of Forth owed its early name of the Frisian Sea. 1 If this were so, Northumbria on either side of the Cheviots can- not have been strange to the German freebooters ; and the withdrawal of the legionaries would soon be followed by their appearance off its coasts. But it is not till long after this time that we catch any his- torical glimpses of English attack. 2 Through the dim haze of northern tradition, we see a chieftain 3 1 Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. 191. Nennius calls it Mare Freisicum, cap. 38. 2 Nennius, sec. 56, 57. Nennius says that after Hengest's death, his son Octa passed from this district into Kent. There is nothing impossible in a Jutish attack on this coast at this early date ; and it receives some support from Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, ed. Har- dy, i. p. 61, "annis enim uno minus centum Nordhanhimbri duces communi habitu contenti, sub imperio Cantuaritarum privatos age- bant," till Ida's choice as king, in 547. 3 Nennius, sec. 56. This is the Arthur so famous afterwards in romance. Mr. Skene, who has done much to elucidate these early struggles, has identified the sites of these battles with spots in the north (see his Celtic Scotland, i. 153-154, and more at large his Four Ancient Books of Wales, i. 51-58); but as Dr. Guest has equally identified them with districts in the south, the matter must still be looked upon as somewhat doubtful. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 69 struggling in battle after battle at the opening of c ha p- n. the sixth century against invaders whose earlier conquests raids reached to the Lennox, but who are gradually % ng il held at bay within the basin of the Tweed. Here, c ~^ _ however, they seem, by the midst of the sixth century, c - 57 °- to have made themselves masters of the ground. Along Lothian, or the coast between Lammermoor and the Forth, they had pushed to the little stream of the Esk, where their way was barred by the rock- fortress of Myned Agned, the site of the later Edin- burgh ; while south of the Lammermoor they had ad- vanced along the loops of the Tweed as far as the vale of the Gala Water, and up the dales and stream- lets which lie to the south and to the north of it, till their advance was thrown back from the wilder hill country on the west. Here the border line of the Cattrail, 1 as it strikes through Ettrick Forest, marks the border of Welsh and Engle. A barrier as diffi- cult curved round to the south in the line of the Cheviots ; but between the extremity of this range and the sea a thin strip of coast offered an open pathway into the country beyond the Tweed ; and Ida — " the Flame-bearer," as the Britons called him — a chieftain of the invaders, whom they raised in 547 to be their king, seized in this quarter a rock . beside the shore, and established a base for further conquest in the fortress of Bamborough. 2 1 See Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. 162. 2 E. Chron. a. 547 (probably from the short chronicle annexed to Baeda's History). Bamborough, it tells us, was first enclosed by a hedge or stockade, and then by a wall. Nennius (sec. 63) says that the place took the name of Bamborough from Bebbe, the wife of ^Ethelfrith. It is some sixteen miles southeast of Berwick. This setting-up of a kingdom under Ida is our only certain date for the 7o THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap^h. I n these earlier conquests of the Bernicians, as conquests Ida's folk were called, the settlement was as com- Engi e e plete as in the rest of Britain. . Their homes, indeed, cloo- mus t have been scantily sprinkled over the wild and c.j>70. half-reclaimed country ; but, scant as they were, these Their " hams " and " tons " told as plainly as in other dis- " tricts the tale of English colonization. Dodings and Livings left their names to hamlets like Doddington and Livingston ; along the wild coast Tynings and Coldings made their fisher -villages at Tyningham and Coldingham ; while Elphinston and Edmonston preserve the memory of English Elphins and Ed- monds who raised their homesteads along the Teviot and the Tweed. Nowhere, indeed, has the English tongue been preserved in greater purity than in the district which now calls itself Southern Scotland. 1 But the years that had been spent in winning this little tract show that the Bernician force was but a small one ; and the continued slowness of their southward advance from Bamborough proves that even after the union under Ida their strength was but little increased. Aided as they were by a civil strife which was breaking the strength of the North- western Britons, 2 Ida and Ida's six sons had to battle along the coast for half a century more before they could drive the Welsh over the western moorlands, Bernician settlement, and would place its probable beginning at a time which could not have been long after a.d. 500. 1 See Murray, Northumbrian English. 2 Thus Ida's third successor, Hussa, fought against four British kings, Urbgen, Riderchen, Guallanc, and Morcant (Geneal. at end of Nennius). These petty chieftains show how the country was broken up. See for this war, Skene, Four Ancient. Books of Wales, i. 336 et seq. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 71 and claim for their own the little valleys of the chap.ii. streams which fell from these moors to the sea conquests through the modern Northumberland. 1 Engie. From the wild moors of Northumbria, however, we c ~^~ _ must pass southward to what was probably a yet c - 57 °- later scene of Ensile conquest in the valley of the The vaiiey of tJl£ Trent. Little as we know of the winning of the north, we know less of the winning of Central Brit- ofthe Trent. 1 Our knowledge of the struggle is drawn from what seems to be a bit of genuine Northumbrian chronicle, embedded in the compila- tion of Nennius, sec. 63. The strife was long and doubtful : " in illo tempore aliquando hostes, nunc cives, vincebantur." Ida reigned till 559 (E. Chron. a. 547). y 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. n. ain ; and not a single record has been left of the conquests progress of the peoples whom we find settled at the Engie. close of the century in the districts of our Notting- c ~soo- nam > our Leicester, and our Northampton, or on the c. 570. head -waters of the°Trent. As their names show, they were of Engle race, and we shall, at a later period in our story, find reason to believe that their inroads and settlements cannot have taken place at a very early period in the sixth century. There was little, indeed, at this time to draw invaders to Central Britain. At the close of the Roman occupation, the basin of the Trent remained one of the wildest and least-frequented parts of the island. The lofty and broken moorlands of the Peak, in which the Pennine range as it runs southward from the Cheviots at last juts into the heart of Britain, were fringed, as they sloped to the plain, by a semicircle of woodlands, round the edge of which the river bent closely in the curve which it makes from its springs to the Humber. On the western flank of the moors a forest known afterwards as Need wood filled up the whole space between the Peak and the Trent, as far as our Burton. On their eastern flank the forest of Sherwood stretched from the outskirts of our Nottingham to a huge swamp into which the Trent widened as it reached the Humber. Here, indeed, a thin line of clay country remained open on the northern bank of the river, but elsewhere it was only on its southern bank that any space could be found for human settlement. But even on this bank such spaces were small and broken, for to the southwest the moorlands threw an outlier across the river in the bleak upland of Cannock Chase, which stretched THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 73 almost to the verge of the forest of Arden, a mighty CHAP - IL woodland that rolled away far over Southern Staf- conquests fordshire nearly to the Cotswolds ; while in the very E ngle e centre of the valley they threw a second outlier c ~^ _ across the Trent in the rugged fastnesses of Charn- c - 57 °- wood, which stretched as far as the outskirts of Leicester. Even the open oolitic country that ex- tended from Charnwood to the borders of Lincoln- shire was narrowly bounded to the south by the fastnesses of Rockingham Forest, which occupied one half of the modern shire of Northampton. It was in this tract, along the southern bank of the Attack on tfl€ J: 1 }' 6 lit river, however, that settlement was most possible, as vaiiey. it was here that the Trent basin was first accessible to the new settlers. While the bulk of the Lindis- waras were slowly pushing their way through the fastnesses of Kesteven to their southern border on the Witham and at Stamford, smaller bodies may well have been descending into the valley of the Trent. From Lindum, indeed, one of the great lines of British communication led straight into this district. The Fosse Road, as it crossed Britain from Ilchester to Lincoln, following, for the most part, the northern slope of the oolitic range, struck by Leices- ter through the broken country to the south of the Trent before it climbed again to the upland at Lin- dum. If they marched by this road from their up- lands, the Lindiswara would touch the river at Farn- don, a village not far from the later Newark, and the name of the station which occupied this site 1 (Ad 1 " Ad Pontem " and the Tiowulfing-ceaster which succeeded it (Baeda, Hist. Eccl. lib. ii. c. 16) have been identified with Newark, Southwell, and other places. It seems certainly to be Farndon. 74 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, ii. Pontem, or Bridge Road) shows that a bridge here conquests led into the districts across it. In this quarter, how- Engie. ever, there was little to be won. On the rising c^oo- ground that formed the outskirts of the Peak, along C.JS70. a ] me of some twenty miles from our Nottingham to Worksop, vast masses of oak and birch, broken CENTRAL BRITAIN. Stanford' a Geographical h'«tabli*h{ by barren reaches of heather, formed the mighty Sherwood, whose relics may still be seen in the woods of Welbeck or Thoresby or Clumber, and whose memory lingers in the tale of Robin Flood.' Between forest and river lay but a thin strip of open 1 The skirts of Sherwood came down to the very north of South- well in the valley of the Trent. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 75 clay land, with lifts of soft sandstone here and there chap, h. along the banks of the Trent ; and on the slopes of conquests one of these lifts, whose face had been long ago Engie. pierced with the cave - dwellings of primeval man, c "^,_ the house of the Snoting-as fixed a home which has c - 57 °- grown into our Nottingham. But the main settle- ment of the conquerors along the lower Trent must have been in the little dales that break the pictur- esque wold country that lies to the south of the river, and through which they pushed along its course as far as its junction with the 'Soar. Here, however, their course may have been barred Rat70. on trie sur f ace f their work lift for us a corner of the veil that shrouds the life of Roman Britain. 1 It Stanford's (JeographicaX Esiab 1 . must have been the North Gyrwas, as their country included in later days its neighbor Peterborough, 2 1 For Durobrivse, see Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, pp. 263, 264, and a paper by Archdeacon Trollope, Archseol. Jour- nal, xxx. 127. Mr. Artis has given plates of the remains in his Duro- brivae Illustrated. 3 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. iv. 6. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 79 who pushed up the Nen to the conquest of Duro- chap. u. brivas. Meanwhile the South Gyrwas were at work conquests along the line of the Ouse and the Cam, where Du- Engie. rolipons, near the present Huntingdon, but on the c ."goo_ other side of the river, guarded a bridge over the c - 57 °- Ouse, and where some miles to the southeast the country was commanded by the town of Cambori- tum, whose site became in later days the site of Cambridge. 1 The place was probably of impor- tance ; but so utter was its destruction that even in Baeda's day nothing was left but a few heaps of ruined stone from which the nuns of Ely fetched a sculptured sarcophagus of marble when they sought a tomb for their abbess ^Ethelthryth. 2 Masters of the road along the borders of the Wash, The Engie the Gyrwas would naturally be drawn forward to the ampton- upland which juts from the westward into its waters, the upland of Northamptonshire. In this direction, however, it was difficult of access. The undulating reach of grassy meadows, broken by thick hedge- rows or copses or tree-crowned knolls, and dotted everywhere with oak or elm, which we see in the shire of to-day, was at the close of the sixth century little more than a vast woodland. Yardley Chase 1 Even after its break-up into shire land the oneness of the South- Gyrwan country was recognized in the fact that there was (at least in Camden's time) but one high-sheriff for the whole area. " He is chosen out of Cambridgeshire one year, out of the Isle of Ely the second, and the third out of Huntingdonshire " (Camden's Britan- nia, ed. 1753, i. 502). 2 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. iv. 19: "Venerunt ad civitatulam quandam desolatam . . . quae lingua Anglorum Granta-caester vocatur ; et mox invenerunt juxta muros civitatis locellum de marmore albo pulcherrime factum, operculo quoque similis lapidis aptissime tec- tum." g THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. ii. and the forests of Selsey and Whittlebury are but conquests dwindled representatives of a long barrier of copse Engie 6 an d thicket that stretched along its southeastern c^oo- slopes, and amidst whose fastnesses lay the town c.j)70. which is represented by our Towcester. Even as late as the Middle Ages the western half of its area, from the edge of the Fens as far inland as Rocking- ham and Kettering, was still one of the largest for- ests of the island; and in earlier days this forest had stretched yet further towards the Nen. 1 It was through this huge woodland that the Engle from the Wash would have to struggle as they mounted the upland ; and their progress must have been a slow one. Their fellow - invaders from the valley of the Soar had an easier task. Along the head- waters of the Nen the upland became clearer ; and though fragments of woodland such as the oak woods that lingered on around Althorpe and Holm- by linked Rockingham with the vaster forest of Ar- den, and thus carried on the forest line across Cen- tral Britain from the Severn to the Wash, yet open spaces remained for settlement and communication. 3 It was across this clearer ground that the Watling Street struck after it had mounted from Stony- Stratford and emerged from the woods of Whittle- bury ; and here it was that the bulk of the new set- tlers raised their homes around the " home-town " of their tribe, the Hampton which was known in after- 1 For Rockingham and its forest, see a paper by Mr. G. T. Clark, Archseol. Journal, xxxv. 209. 2 By Elizabeth's day sheep-farming, for which this district was renowned, had made this part of the shire " a great open pasture," as now. But the woodlands were still thick about Towcester and Rockingham (Camden, Britannia, ed. 1753, i. 511). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 8 1 days as Northampton to distinguish it from the char n. South-Hampton beside the Solent. conquests While Engle bands were thus pushing up the E ngie. Soar to Ratae and the upland which formed the c .~^>_ southern brink of the Trent basin, others must have c '_^°- been advancing along the great river beyond the The West bounds of the Middle English to near its junction with the Tame. As they struck to the north up the valleys of the Derwent and the Dove into the moor- lands of the Peak, these seem to have become known as the Pec-saetan ; but their settlement in what was the later Derbyshire would necessarily be a scanty and unimportant one. Of far greater importance was the advance of their fellows to the west. Spread- ing along the quiet open meadows beside the Tame, the invaders as they fixed their " worth " of Tam- worth on a little rise above its waters at their union with the Anker, saw the dark and barren moorlands of Cannock Chase stretching like a barrier across their path. Lichfield, " the field of the dead," may, as the local tradition ran, mark the place of some fight that left them masters of the ground beneath its slopes ; but the Chase itself was impassable. At either end of it, however, a narrow gap gave access to the country in its rear. Between its northern extremity and the Needwood which lay thick along the Trent, the space along the channel of the great river was widened by the little valley of the Sow. Between its southern end and the dark edge of Ar- den, which then ran to the north of our Walsall and Wolverhampton, interposed a like gap of open coun- try through which the Watling Street passed on its way to the Severn. By both of these openings the 6 8 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. char ii. West Engle, as this folk of conquerors at first called conquests itself, pushed into the open tract between Cannock Engie. and the low line of moorlands thrown down from c.^oo- the heights of Mole Cop in the north, which marks c.j570. the water-parting between the basins of the Severn and the Trent. Stafford, the " Stone-ford," marks their passage over the Sow to the head-waters of the great river which had led them through the heart of Central Britain, though the woods thrown out from Needwood across the district of Trentham must have long hindered them from penetrating to its northern founts. Here, however, they were brought for a while to a stand ; for that these moorlands long remained a march or border-land between Engle and Welshman we see from the name by which the West English became more commonly known, the Mer- cians, or the Men of the March. 1 1 The date of the conquest of Mercia can only be a matter of in- ference, as we have no record of any part of the winning of Central Britain. Florence of Worcester, ed. Thorpe (vol. i. p. 264) says, " post initium regni Cantuariorum principium exstitit regni Merciorum," which tells us nothing; but if Penda was (E. Chron. a. 626) fifty when he began his reign in 626 (Baeda, ii. 20, seems to put this in 633), he was born about 576, when we may take it his people were already on the upper Trent. This squares with Huntingdon's state- ment, " Regnum Merce incipit, quod Crida ut ex scriptis conjicere possumus primus obtinuit " ( Hist. Angl. ed. Arnold, p. 53 ), a fact which he inserts between Ceawlin's overthrow at Fethanlea in 584 and his death in 593. Crida, or Creoda, was Penda's grandfather : " Penda was the son of Pybba, Pybba of Creoda " (E. Chron. a. 626). The setting-up of a king would, no doubt, follow here as elsewhere a period of conquest under ealdormen which would carry us back to near the middle of the century for the first attack on the head- waters of the Trent. The conquests of the Middle Engle would of course precede those of the Mercians. We may gather from the limits of the bishopric of the Mercians that the Pec-saetan of our Derbyshire were only a part of these West Engle. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 83 CHAPTER III. CONQUESTS OF THE SAXONS. c. 500-577. With the settlement of the Mercians the work Th J West Faxons. of the Engle in Central and Northern Britain was done. But we have still to follow the work of the conquerors who through the same memorable years had been making themselves masters of the south. While the Engle had been winning one flank of the Saxon Shore, the Saxons were as slowly winning an even more important district on its other flank. 1 To westward of the strip of coast between the Andreds- weald and the sea which had been won by the war bands of ^Ella, the alluvial flat whose inlets had drawn the South Saxons to their landing in Chich- ester Water broadened into a wider tract around a greater estuary, that of the Southampton Water, as it strikes inland from the sea-channels of the So- lent and Spithead. This opening in the coast was already recognized as of both military and commer- cial importance. It was the one break in the long line of forests which, whether by the fastnesses of the Andredsweald or by the hardly less formidable fastnesses of our Dorset, stretched like a natural barrier along the whole southern coast of Britain ; 1 From this point we are again on distinctly historic ground, as the Chronicle records every step in the conquest of Wessex. 8 4 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. for though woodlands lay even here along the shore, conquests it was in a thin line broken by the estuary and by Saxons, the channels of its tributaries, and cleft by the roads «^T C ™ that run from Winchester to Porchester or alone; the C. SOO-077. ° — valley of the Itchen. 1 By either estuary or roads it was easy to reach the upland of the Gwent, and to strike across it into the very heart of Britain. The importance of such a point was shown by the reso- lute resistance of its defenders ; and the Saxo.ns who attacked it during the latter years of the fifth cen- tury seem to have failed to make any permanent settlement along the coast. The descents of their leaders, Cerdic and Cynric, in 495," at the mouth of the Itchen, and a fresh descent on Porchester in 50 1, 3 can have been little more than plunder raids; and though in 508 4 a far more serious conflict ended in the fall of five thousand Britons and their chief, it was not till 514 that the tribe whose older name seems to have been that of the Gewissas, but who were to be more widely known as the West Saxons, actually landed with a view to definite conquest. 5 Pushing up the Itchen to the plunder of Winches- ter, they must have been already masters of the 1 For these woodlands, see Guest, E. E. Sett. pp. 31, 32. I again follow mainly the guidance of this paper, as far as the West-Saxon conquests are concerned, up to the battle of Bedford. 2 E. Chron. a. 495. 3 E. Chron. a. 501. 4 E. Chron. a. 508, and Huntingdon, Hist. Angl. ed. Arnold, p. 46, who adds that the West Sexe were aided here by the Kentish men and South Sexe. 5 E. Chron. a. 514. My inferences from the entries in the Chron- icle are here somewhat different from those of Dr. Guest ; nor have I felt justified in adopting his ingenious theory as to the struggle of 508. See Guest, E. E. Sett. pp. 55-60. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 85 downs around it when they turned to clear the Brit- ons from the forests in their rear; for a fight at Charford on the lower Avon in 519 seems to mark the close of a conflict in which the provincials were driven from the woodlands whose shrunken remains meet us in the New Forest, and in which the whole district between the Andredsweald and the lower Avon was secured for English holding. 1 The suc- CHAP. III. Conquests of the Saxons. c. 500-577. Conquest of Hamp- shire and Isle of Wight. cess at Charford was followed by the political organ- ization of the conquerors ; and Cerdic and Cynric became kings of the West Saxons. 2 Here, however, 1 E. Chron. a. 519 ; ^Ethelweard, a. 519. * E. Chron. a. 519. 85 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, in. their success came to an end. Across Avon the conquests forest belt again thickened into a barrier that held Saxons, the invaders at bay ; for when in the following year, c. 500^577. 5 2 °' tne y c l° ve their way through it to the valley — of the Frome, eager perhaps for the sack of a city whose site is marked by our Dorchester, they were met by the Britons at Badbury or Mount Badon, 1 and thrown back in what after-events show to have been a crushing defeat. The border-line of our Hampshire to the west still marks the point at which the progress of the Gewissas was arrested by this overthrow ; 2 and how severe was the check is shown by the long cessation of any advance in this quarter. We hear only of a single battle of the West Sexe 3 during the rest of the reign of Cerdic; while the Jutes who had aided in his descents, and who had struck up the Hamble to a clearing along its course where the villages of Meon Stoke and West and East Meon still preserve a memory of their settle- ment of the Meonwara, 4 turned to the conquest of 1 Gildas, Hist. sec. 26. For the identification of this battle with that of Mount Badon, and of its site with Badbury in Dorsetshire, see Guest, E. E. Sett. pp. 61-63. 2 The position of Sorbiodunum, which was still in British hands, gives at least one firm standpoint in the question of West-Saxon boundaries at this time. The limits which Guest assigns them (E. E. Sett. pp. 64, 65) to north and east — reaching as far as the Cherwell and Englefield — seem to me inconsistent with their later campaigns ; in fact, I can hardly doubt that Hampshire, as a whole, represents the West-Saxon kingdom after 520. 3 E. Chron. a. 527. * Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 15 : " De Jutarum origine sunt Cantuarii et Vectuarii, hoc est, ea gens quae Vectam tenet insulam, et ea quae usque hodie in provincia occidentalium Saxonum Jutarum natio nominatur, posita contra ipsam insulam Vectam." Politically the Meonwara went with the Isle of Wight, and not with Wessex. See Wulfere's grant to yEdilwalch ; Baeda, Hist. Eccl. iv. 13. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 87 the island that lay off the Solent. In 530 Cerdic and chap. m. Cynric subdued the Isle of Wight, but it was in the conquests interest not of their own people but of its allies, for s ax0 ns. the new settlers of the island, the Wightgara, whose c 5 ^I 577i name survives in their town of Carisbrook or Wight- — gara-burh, were not West Sexe, but Jutes. 1 Small as it was, the conquest was a memorable one ; for with it ended for centuries the work of the Jutes in Brit- ain. Causes which are hidden from us must have diverted their energies elsewhere ; the winning of Britain was left to the Saxon and the Engle ; and it was not till Britain was won that the Jutes returned to dispute it with their old allies under the name of the Danes. 2 But the conquest of the isle had hardly less sig- *!? use °f nificance for the West Sexe themselves. If they ohs. turned to the sea, it was that landwards all progress seemed denied them. Not only had the woodlands of the coast proved impassable, but the invaders of the Gwent found barriers almost as strong on every side. Higher up on their western border the fortress of Sorbiodunum, or Old Sarum, guarded the valley of the Avon and blocked the way to Salisbury Plain, while to eastward of the Gwent ran the thickets of the Andredsweald, and beneath its northern escarp- ment stretched a forest which for centuries to come filled the valley of the Kennet. The strength of these natural barriers was doubled by strongholds which furnished the Britons with bases for defensive operations as well as with supplies of fighting-men ; for while Silchester or Calleva barred the march of 1 See passage quoted above. Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 15. 3 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 46. gg THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. the Gewissas across the tract between the Andreds- conquests weald and the Thames, Cunetio, on the site of our Saxons. Marlborough, held the downs to the north, and c. 500^577 guarded the road that led from Winchester to the — Severn valley. How formidable these obstacles were we see from the long inaction of the West Saxons. While the Engle in the north were slowly fighting their way across Yorkshire or Lincolnshire, their rivals in the south lay quiet for thirty years within the limits of our Hampshire. From the position, in- deed, of their central " tun " of Hampton (our South- ampton), it would seem as if their main settlement was still on the coast, and as if the ruins of Win- chester were left silent and deserted in the upper downs. What broke this inaction — whether the Britons had grown weaker, or whether fresh reinforcements had strengthened their opponents — we do not know. We hear only that Cynric, whom Cerdic's death left King of the West Saxons, again took up the work of in- vasion in 552 by a fresh advance on the west. 1 Win- chester was the meeting-point of five Roman roads ; and of these one struck directly westward, along the northern skirts of the woodlands that filled the space between the lower Itchen and the mid-valley of the Avon, to the fortress of Old Sarum. 2 Celt and Ro- man alike had seen the military value of the height from which the eye sweeps nowadays over the grassy meadows of the Avon to the arrowy spire of Salis- bury ; and admirable as the position was in itself, it had been strengthened at a vast cost of labor. The 1 E. Chron. a. 552. 2 See map in Guest's E. E. Settlements in Southern Britain. num. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 89 camp on the summit of the knoll was girt in by a chap. m. trench hewn so deeply in the chalk that from the conquests inner side of it the white face of the rampart rose a saxonl hundred feet high, while strong outworks protected c5 ^ 577 the approaches to the fortress from the west and from ■ — the east. 1 Arms must have been useless against such a stronghold as this ; and, though the Britons were " put to flight " before its investment, the reduction of Sorbiodunum was probably due rather to famine or want of water than to the sword. But its fall brought with it the easy winning of the Conquest district which it guarded, as well as the downs on Wiltshire. whose edge stood the strange monument, then as now an object of wonder, to which the conquerors as they marched beside its mystic circle gave the name of the Hanging Stones, Stonehenge. The Gewissas passed over the Stratford, or paved ford by which the road they had followed from Winchester passed the river, to the westernmost reaches of the Gwent, the district we now know as Salisbury Plain. To the south of them as they marched, behind the lower Avon and its little affluent of the Nadder, a broken and woodland country whose memory lingers in Cranbourne Chase screened the later Dorsetshire from their arms ; 2 but in their front the open downs offered no line of defence, and the Gewissas could push along the road from Old Sarum unhindered till they reached the steep slope down which the up- 1 G. J. Clark, " Earthworks of the Wiltshire Avon," Archaeol. Jour- nal, xxxii. 290. 2 The name of " Britford," which still clings to a passage over the Avon in this quarter, may mark a point in the new border-line where the Briton still faced his foe. g Q THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. land fell into the valley of the Frome. How roughly conquests their march was checked at this point by the dense saxons. forests which filled the Frome valley we see from the c 500^577 f ac t t na t these woodlands remained in British hands for more than a hundred years ; and the significant name of " Mere " preserves for us the memory of the border -bound which the Gewissas were forced to draw along the western steeps of their new conquest. The conquerors turned back to settle in the land they had won — in the river-valleys which scored the surface of the downs, in the tiny bends and grassy nooks of the vale of Avon, or in the meadows along the course of its affluent, the Wil or Wiley. It was probably in the last that the main body of the in- vaders fixed their home ; for it was the Wiley, and the little township, or Wil-ton, which rose beside it, which gave them from this time their new name of Wil-saetas. From this time, indeed, the Gewissas, or West Saxons, felt the need of local names for the peoples into which conquest broke them as they pushed over the country. But the character of these names shows the looseness of the bonds that held such " folks " together. Each knew itself simply as a group of "saltan," or "settlers," in the land it had won — Wilt-saetan in the lands about the Wiley, Dor- saetan in the forest tract through which wound the " dwr " or dark water of the Frome, Somer-ssetan or Defna-saetan in lands yet more to the west. Cynric's But there was little to detain Cynric in the tinv advance. J . . J vales and bare reaches of upland which his arms had as yet given him; and in 556, only four years after the fall of Old Sarum, he pushed forward again along a road that led from Winchester northwest- THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. oj ward in the direction of Cirencester and the Severn, chap. m. Descending the deep escarpment which forms the conquests northern face of the Hampshire Downs, he threaded saxons. his way through the woodlands of the vale of Pewsey, c 5 ^ 577 whose relics survive in the forest of Savernake, and — again mounted the slopes on the further side of them. Here he made himself master of the town of Cunetio and of the upland which lay about it by a victory on the very brink of the downs at Barbury Hill. 1 The ground, however, of which he thus became lord was far from affording any obstacle to further advance ; on the contrary, its very character seemed to draw the Gewissas onward to new aggressions. The Marlborough Downs are, in fact, the starting-point from which the second and greatest of its chalk ranges runs across Southern Britain. The upland trends to the northeast under the name of the Ilsley Downs till it reaches a gap through which the Thames strikes southward to its lower river-valley ; then rising again in the Chilterns, it broadens at last into the Gwent, in which the East Anglians had found a home. In its earlier course this range nat- urally called Cynric's men to a fresh advance; for from the downs above Marlborough the high ground runs on without a break to the course of the Thames. This tract, however, like that which they had trav- ersed in the Gwent, must have been a scantily peo- pled one; and its invaders would turn with eager- ness to the more tempting district which lay in the lower ground on either side of it. The northern 1 " Byran-byrig," E. Chron. a. 556 ; Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 67 ; Hunt- ingdon, Hist. Angl. ed. Arnold, p. 51, gives large details of this bat- tle, but we do not know his authority for them. q 2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. face of the downs consists of a line of steep cliffs, conquests looking out over a vale through which the stream nf thfi Saxons, of the Ock pours its waters into the Thames. On c. 500^577. the face of this escarpment the traveller still sees, drawn white against the scanty turf, the gigantic form of a horse which gives the vale of White Horse its name, and which tradition looks on as a work of the conquering Gewissas. Another monu- ment of their winning of this district lingers in the rude stones called Weyland Smith's House, a crom- lech of primeval times where the Saxons found a dwelling-place for the weird legend of a hero-smith which they brought with them from their German homeland. Conquest The White Horse o-limmers over a broad and Berkshire, fertile region, whose local names recall for us the settlement of the conquerors in hamlets that have grown into quiet little towns like Wantage, the future birthplace of Alfred, or in homesteads that crowned the low rises or " duns " which overlooked the valley, such as the dun where the Farrings planted their Farringdon, or another dun at the confluence of the Ock and the Thames, where the West Saxon Abba chose the site for a dwelling-place which grew in later days into our Abingdon. On the south the downs fell in gentler slopes to the vale of the Kennet, whose silvery stream ran through masses of woodland, past the ford at Hungerford and the " new burh " of the conquerors which sur- vives in Newbury, to the low and swampy meadows where it meets the Thames, as the river bursts from its cleft through the chalk range to open out into its lower valley. In these meadows the house of THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. g^ the Readings planted a settlement which has grown chap, m into the busy town that preserves their name. Still conquests further to the east the invaders pushed their way saxons. into the tangled woodland that stretched along the c 5^577. low clay flats which bordered the southern bank of — the Thames, and where the predominance of the box, or bearroc, may have given in after -days its name of " Bearrocshire," or Berkshire, to the whole tract of valley and down which this fresh advance added to the dominions of the West Saxons. 1 With its conquest the winning of the southern The valley uplands was complete. And with the winning of Thames. these uplands the whole island lay open to the Gewissas ; for the Andredsweald, which had held back the invader for half a century, was turned as soon as the West Saxons stood masters of the Southern Gwent, and their country now jutted for- ward like a huge bastion into the heart of uncon- quered Britain. Only on one side were the obstacles in their way still serious. The woods of Dorsetshire, with the thick wedge of forest which blocked the valley of the Frome beneath the Wiltshire Downs, were for long years to hold any western advance at bay; but elsewhere the land was open to their at- tack. On the northwest easy slopes led to the crest of the Cotswolds, from whence the Severn valley lay before them for their prey. On the north their march would find no natural obstacles as it passed up the Cherwell valley to penetrate either to the central plain of Britain or to the Wash. Above all, to the eastward opened before them the valley of 1 For these woodlands, see Guest's E. E. Sett. p. 32. The Kennet valley was not disafforested till the time of Henry the Third. o 4 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, in. the Thames. From its springs near the crest of the conquests Cotswolds the river falls quietly to the low ground Saxons, beneath the Marlborough Downs, and then turns c. 500^577. abruptly to the south to hew a channel through the line of chalk uplands, and thus part the Berkshire heights from the Chilterns. Once out of this narrow gorge, it bends round the woodlands where the ad- vanced guard of Cynric's men were feeling their way into the fastnesses about Windsor, and, rolling in a slower and larger current eastward through the wide valley that lies between the north downs and the East-Anglian heights, after a course of two hun- dred miles it reaches its estuary and the sea. its No road can have seemed so tempting to the earlier invaders as this water-road of the Thames, leading as it did straight from the Channel to the heart of Britain through an open and fruitful coun- try; and it was by this road that their advance seemed destined to be made when they settled on either side of its estuary in Essex and in Kent. But a century had passed since these settlements, and the Thames valley still remained untouched. Tempting as the road seemed, indeed, no inlet into Britain was more effectually barred. On either side the river-mouth, at but little distance from the coast on which East Saxon and Kentishman were en- camped, long belts of woodland and fen stretched to the very brink of the Thames. On the south of it the fastnesses of the Weald found their line of defence prolonged by huge swamps that stretched to the river, and whose memory is still preserved by the local names as by the local floods of Rother- hithe and Bermondsey. To the north as formidable THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. ^ a line of defence presented itself in the tangled CHAP - m> forest whose last relics survive in the woods of conquests Epping and in the name of Hainault, and this bar- s ° aX o n l rier of woodland was backed by the swamps of the c 5 ^I 577 lower Lea to the rear of it. The one line of ad- . — vance, in fact, open to an invader was the course of the Thames itself, and the course of the Thames was blocked by the fortress of London. The commercial greatness of London has made ^•»^<>/" men forget its military importance, but from the first moment of its history till late into the Middle Ages London was one of the strongest of our fortresses. Its site, indeed, must have been dictated, like that of most early cities, by the advantages which it pre- sented as well for defence as for trade. 1 It stood at the one point by which either merchant or invader could penetrate from the estuary into the valley of the Thames ; and in its earlier days, before the great changes wrought by the embankment of the Romans, this was also the first point at which any rising ground for the site of such a town presented itself on either shore of the river. Nowhere has the hand of man moulded ground into shapes more strangely contrasted with its natural form than on the site. of - London. Even as late as the time of Caesar, the soil which a large part of it covers can have been little but a vast morass. Below Fulham the river stretched at high tide over the ground that lies on either side 1 Rev. W. J. Loftie, " London before the Houses," Macmillan's Magazine, xxxiv. 356. To this paper we may add Dr. Guest's re- marks on ancient Middlesex in his "Aulus Plautius," Archaeol. Journal, xxiii. 159. See, too, Quarterly Review, July, 1880, "Mid- dlesex." 9 6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. Conquests of the Saxons. c. 500-577. of its present channel from the rises of Kensington and Hyde Park to the opposite shores of Peckham and Camberwell. All Pimlico and Westminster to the north, to the south all Battersea and Lambeth, all Newington and Kennington, all Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, formed a vast lagoon, broken only by EARLY LONDON. (Local names around of later date.) u „ J ftp* Wimbledon Q- Stanford's UeogM Eetab*. little rises which became the " eyes " and " hithes," the "islands" and " landing -rises," of later settle- ments. Yet lower down to the eastward the swamp widened as the Lea poured its waters into the Thames in an estuary of its own — an estuary which ran far to the north over as wide an expanse of marsh and fen, THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. o* while at its mouth it stretched its tidal waters over chap. m. the mud flats which have been turned by embank- conquests ment into the Isle of Dogs. 1 Near the point where s ° a f XO ns. the two rivers meet, a traveller who was mountine; ~ m . Oc. 500-577. the Thames from the sea saw the first dry land to — which his bark could steer. The spot was, in fact, the extremity of a low line of rising ground which was thrown out from the heights of Hampstead that border the river-valley to the north, and which passed over the sites of our Hyde Park and Hol- born to thrust itself on the east into the great morass. This eastern portion of it, however, was severed from the rest of the rise by the deep gorge of a stream that fell from the northern hills, the stream of the Fleet, whose waters, long since lost in London sewers, ran in earlier days between steep banks — banks that still leave their impress in the local levels, and in local names like Snow Hill — to the Thames at Blackfriars. The rise or "dun" that stretched from this tidal M>taBrit- T^l i town. channel of the Fleet to the spot now marked by the Tower, and which was destined to become the site of London, rose at its highest some fifty feet above 1 Guest, "Aulus Plautius," Archseol. Journal, xxiii. 179. "When the Romans under Aulus Plautius came down the Watling Street to the neighborhood of London, they saw before them a wide ex- panse of marsh and mud bank, which twice every day assumed the character of an estuary sufficiently large to excuse, if not to justify, the statement of Dion, that the river there emptied itself into the ocean. No dykes then retained the water within certain limits. One arm of this great wash stretched northward up the valley of the Lea, and the other westward up the valley of the Thames." " The name of London refers directly to the marshes, though I can- not here enter into a philological argument to prove the fact " (p. 180). 7 98 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. the level of the tide, and was broken into two parts conquests by a ravine through which ran the stream which Saxons, has since been known as the Wallbrook. Such a c 500^577 position was admirably adapted for defence ; it was, — indeed, almost impregnable. Sheltered to east and south by the lagoons of the Lea and the Thames, guarded to westward by the deep cleft of the Fleet, it saw stretching along its northern border the broad fen whose name has survived in our modern Moor- gate, Nor, as the first point at which merchants could land from the great river, was the spot less adapted for trade. But it was long before the trader found dwelling on its soil. Old as it is, London is far from being one of the oldest of British cities ; till the coming of the Romans, indeed, the loneliness of its site seems to have been unbroken by any settle- ment whatever. The " dun " was, in fact, the centre of a vast wilderness. Beyond the marshes to the east lay the forest track of Southern Essex. Across the lagoon to the south rose the woodlands of Syden- ham and Forest Hill, themselves but advance-guards of the fastnesses of the Weald. To the north the heights of Highgate and Hampstead were crowned with forest masses, through which the boar and the wild ox wandered without fear of man down to the days of the Plantagenets. Even the open country to the west was but a waste. It seems to have formed the border-land between two British tribes who dwelt in Hertford and in Essex, and its barren clays were given over to solitude by the usages of primeval war. 1 1 Guest, "Aulus Plautius," Archaeol. Journal, xxiii. 167: "Merely a march of the Catuvellauni, a common through which ran a wide THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. oo With the coming of the Roman, however, this sol- CHAP - in. itude passed away. 1 We know nothing of the set- conquests tlement of the town ; but its advantages as the first saxons. landing-place along the Thames secured for it at 5 ^T 577 once the command of all trading; intercourse with „ — /-' ii i /-» i ■ i i • Roman Gaul, and through Gaul with the empire at large. London. So rapid was its growth that only a few years after the landing of Claudius London had risen into a flourishing port, the massacre of whose foreign trad- ers was the darkest blot on the British rising under track-way, but in which was neither town, village, nor inhabited house. No doubt the Catuvellauni fed their cattle in the march, and there may have been shealings here to shelter their herdsmen." " I have little doubt that between Brockley Hill and the Thames all was wilderness from the Lea to the Brent." 1 Guest ("Aulus Plautius," Archaeol. Journal, xxiii. 180) suggests the Roman origin of London. " When in the autumn of 43 Aulus Plautius drew the lines of circumvallation round his camp, I be- lieve he founded the present metropolis of Britain. The notion entertained by some antiquaries, that a British town preceded the Roman camp, has no foundation to rest upon, and is inconsistent with all we know of the early geography of this part of Britain." Much has been made of its name, but " Llyn-dyn," or whatever the Celtic form may be, is as likely to be the designation of a spot as of a town on it. An almost conclusive proof, however, that no such town existed west of the Fleet may be drawn from the line of the old British road from Kent (the predecessor of the Watling Street), which, instead of crossing the river, as in Roman and later times, at the point marked by London Bridge, passed, according to Higden, to a point opposite Westminster, and, crossing the river there, struck north along the line of Park Lane and Edgware Road ( Loftie, " Roman London," Archaeol. Journal, xxxiv. 165). Such a course is inconsistent with the existence of a town on the site of the later London ; in fact, the rise of such a town is the best explanation of the later change in the line of this road, which brought about its passage by the bridge. 2 As we have seen, vessels from Gaul simply crossed the Channel to Richborough, and avoided the circuit of the north Foreland by using the channel of the Wantsum, through which they passed by Reculver into the Thames. IOO THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. Boadicea. 1 But the town soon recovered from the conquests blow. If York became the official capital of the saxons. province, London formed its actual centre, for by one c 500^577 °^ tne man y advantages of its site it was necessarily — the point from which the roads of the conquerors radiated over the island. Such a point would natu- rally have been found at Richborough, where the line of communication with the body of the empire passed the Channel at its narrowest part. But Kent, as we have seen, was shut in by barriers which made com- munication with the rest of the island impracticable, save at the single spot where the road, thus drawn inland from Richborough, found a practicable pas- sage over the Thames. And this spot was at Lon- don ; for London was the lowest ground on the tidal waters of the river on which it was possible to build a bridge ; and, even before a bridge was built, it was the lowest ground where passage could be gained by a ferry. But once over the river, the difficulty of divergence was removed, and it was thus that roads struck from London to every quarter of Britain. 2 As the meeting -point of these roads, the point of their contact with the lines of communication be- tween the province and the Empire, as well as the natural port for the bulk of its trade, which then lay 1 For " Roman London," we have numerous papers, especially in the Archseologia, by Mr. Wright, Sir William Tite, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Black, and Mr. Roach Smith, and a separate treatise by the last author on " The Antiquities of Roman London." See, too, Mr. Loftie's "Roman London," in Archseol. Journal, xxxiv. 164. 2 Roads such as the Fosse Road or the Icknield Way are of earlier than Roman date ; and their direction was determined by very dif- ferent social and political circumstances from those of Britain in the Roman times (see Guest, " Aulus Plautius," Archaeol. Journal, xxiii. 175). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. IOI exclusively with the Mediterranean and the Channel, chap. in. London could not fail to grow fast in population and conquests 1,1 .of the Wealth. Saxons. From the traces of burial, indeed, which we find c 5{ ^T 577 over part of the ground, it seems almost certain that , — , ,. . & , ,. Its growth. the earlier city was far from extending over the whole of the space embraced within the existing Roman walls. It is possible that Londinium at first only occupied the height to the eastward of the Wallbrook, which then .ran in a deep channel to its little port at Dowgate, and that its northern bound was marked by a trench whose memory survives in the name of our " Langbourne " Ward ; while the ground to the westward as far as the Fleet was still open and used for interments. But buildings soon rose over the ground outside these narrow bounds. We find traces of villas and pavements stretching over the earlier grave-grounds ; and by the close of the third century at latest London had spread over the whole area of the rise east of the Fleet between the Thames and the Moor. It was this London that was girt in by the massive walls which were probably raised by Theodosius, 1 when the inroads of the Picts and the descents of the Saxons first 1 The ease with which the Frankish soldiers, after the fall of Al- lectus, fell back on and plundered London suggests that it was then without defence. The reign of Valentinian seems the most proba- ble date for raising walls after this time ; and the coins found along its course point to the second half of the fourth century. There are signs, too, that the wall was raised in some haste, and under the pressure of urgent necessity ; for it is carried over cemeteries and the sites of existing houses, covering even their encaustic pavements in its course ; and fragments of building and sculptures are found worked into it. I02 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, in. made walls necessary for the security of towns in conquests Britain. saxons. But the city spread even beyond these wide c 500^577 Doun cls. Houses of citizens studded the country — around its walls, and bordered the roads which Its impor- tance, struck westward along the hollow bourne, or Hol- born, and northward along our Gracechurch Street. Outside the walls, too, lay a ring of burial-places at Shoreditch and elsewhere ; while a suburb rose across the river on the site of the present Southwark. One of the most laborious works of the Roman set- tlers was the embankment of the lower channels of the Thames and of the Lea; and it w r as on ground thus gained from the morass across the river at our Southwark that dwellings clustered whose number and w r ealth leave hardly a doubt that they were already linked by a bridge with the mother city. 1 Of London itself, however, we know little. Tradi- tion places a temple of Diana on the spot where the Christian missionaries raised in after -time the Church of St. Paul, and here on this higher ground some statelier public buildings may have clustered round it. But the scarcity of stone and abundance of clay in its neighborhood were fatal to any archi- tectural pretensions ; and from the character of its remains the town seems to have been little more than a mass of brick houses and red -tiled roofs, 1 " When the foundations of the old bridge were taken up, a line of coins, ranging from the Republican period to Honorius, were found in the bed of the river. . . . The completeness of the series can only be accounted for on the supposition that a bridge, pre- ceded, perhaps, by a rope or chain ferry, was very early thrown across the Thames " (Lottie's " Roman London," Archaeol. Journal, xxxiv. 172). THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. IO , pierced with a net-work of the narrow alleys which chap, m. passed for streets in the Roman world, and cleft conquests throughout its area by two wider roads from the saxons. bridge. One of these led by a gate near our Bish- C 5 ^ 577 opsgate to the northern road, the other by a line which is partly represented in our Cannon Street to Newgate and the west. But if it fell far beneath many of the British towns in its outer seeming, as it fell beneath York in official rank, London sur- passed all in population and wealth. Middlesex possibly represents a district which depended on it in this earlier, as it certainly did in a later, time ; and the privileges of the chase, which its citizens enjoyed throughout the Middle Ages in the woodland that covered the heights of Hampstead and along the southern bank of the river as far as the Cray, may have been drawn from the rights of the Roman burghers. In the downfall of the Imperial rule, such a town London would doubtless gain a virtual independence ; but invaders. through the darkness of the time we catch only a passing glimpse of its life, when the Britons, after their rout at Crayford, fled from the Jutes to find shelter at " Lundenbyryg." ' Its power, however, was seen in the arrest of the invaders as they neared its southern suburb ; for the western border of Kent represents, no doubt, fairly enough the point at which the Londoners were able to hold the "Cant-wara" at bay on the edge of the morass that stretched from Southwark to the Dulwich hills. Hardly were these southern assailants brought to a standstill when 1 E. Chron. a. 457. I04 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, hi. London must have had to struggle against assailants conquests' on the northern bank of the river. Here, however, Saxons, the attack was probably a fainter one. Not only c. 500^577 was tne nne °f f° res t and marsh along the lower — channel of the Lea impenetrable, but the woodland and mud flats of Southern Essex offered little temp- tation to the settlers who might have pressed for- ward in this quarter. The energies of the East Saxons were, in fact, long drawn elsewhere ; for their settlements lay mainly in the north of the district to which they gave their name, where a clearer and more fertile country offered them homes in the val- leys of the Colne and the Stour ; and even here their numbers must have been too small to push in- land, for half a century seems to have elapsed after their first settlement before they were strong enough to advance from the coast into the interior of the island. Fail of When the time came for such an advance, it lav Verula- . . . J mium. naturally up the river-valleys in which they had set- tled ; and these led through thinner woodland to a point in the downs where Saffron Walden still marks an open " dene " that broke the thickets of the waste or " Weald." Once on these downs, the East Saxons found themselves encamped on the central uplands of the line of chalk heights whose extremi- ties had already been seized by their brethren in Berkshire, and by the Engle in the eastern counties. Though the tract was traversed by the great road which ran across Mid-Britain from London to Ches- ter, the road to which the English gave its later name of Watling Street, it was a wild and lonely region, whose woodlands, even in the days of the THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. I05 Norman kings, made travel through it a dangerous ch ap- in. business. 1 At this time it probably formed the dis- conquests trict of Verulamium, a town which stood near the saxons. site of the present St. Albans. Verulamium was c 5 ^r 577i one of the oldest towns in Britain ; and, in spite of — the wild tract in which it stood, its position on the main road from London across Mid- Britain gave it a wealth and importance which are still witnessed by the traces of an amphitheatre, the extent of its walls, and the expanse of ruins from which the abbey and abbey-church of later days were mainly construct- ed. Since Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, it had won celebrity as the scene of the martyrdom of a Christian soldier, Alban, who was said to have suffered under Diocletian, and whose church was a centre of Christian devotion. 2 But neither its wealth nor its sanctity saved it from the invaders. Its fall was complete ; and for centuries to come the broken and charred remains of the town were left in solitude without inhabitants. 3 The fall of Verulamium, and the settlement of its Fail of conquerors in the downs about it, must have fallen on London as a presage of ruin. A hundred years 1 Guest, " Four Roman Ways," Archaeol. Journal, xiv. 114. 2 Gildas, Hist. cap. 10 ; Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 7. 3 Our only guides to the date of the conquest of Hertfordshire are the date of the earlier conquest of Essex, which, as we have seen, can hardly have been long before a.d. 500, and that of the fall of Verulamium. That Verulamium had fallen before 560 is shown by the lament over its ruin in Gildas (Hist. sec. 10) ; but its fall can hardly have been much earlier. The bounds of the diocese of Lon- don, which represent the kingdom of Essex, show that the Hert- fordshire men were part of the East Saxons. The present shire of Hertford, however, is far from coinciding in its limits with those of the East-Saxon realm or diocese. io 6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. had passed away since Hengest's men had fallen conquests back baffled from its neighborhood ; and in the long of tho ■ Saxons, interval its burghers may have counted themselves c. 500^577. sa f e from attack. But year by year the circle of in- vasion had been closing round the city. The con- quest of Kent had broken its communications with the Continent, and whatever trade might struggle from the southern coast through the Weald had been cut off by the conquest of Sussex. That of the Gwent about Winchester closed the road to the southwest, while the capture of Cunetio interrupted all communication with the valley of the Severn and the rich country along its estuary. And now the occupation of Hertfordshire cut off the city from Northern and Central Britain, for it was over these chalk uplands that the Watling Street struck across the central plain to Chester and the northwest, and it was through Verulamium that travellers bent round the forest block above London on their way to the north. Only along the Thames itself could London maintain any communication with what re- mained of Britain; and even this communication must have been threatened as the invaders crept down the slopes from the north through the wood- land which crowned the rises of Hampstead and Highgate, or descended by the valleys of the Brent and the Colne on the tract which retains their name of Middle-Sexe. The settlers in this district, indeed, seem to have been unimportant, and the walls of the great city were still strong enough to defy any di- rect attack. But when once the invading force had closed fairly round it, London, like its fellow-towns, must have yielded to the stress of a long blockade. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. IQ y Although no record remains of its capture or sur- chap. m. render, 1 the course of events seems to give the date conquests of its fall pretty clearly. It was certainly in English saxons. hands by the opening of the seventh century ; ' 2 and c 5^577. its fall is the one event which would account for a movement of the Kentishmen which we find taking place, at the moment which we have reached, along the southern bank of the Thames. 3 Since the death of Hengest, the kingdom of Kent Kent. had played no direct part in the conquest of Britain. Jutes had, indeed, mastered the Isle of Wight, and Jutish houses had joined the Saxon war bands in their winning of Southern Britain ; but the Jutish kingdom itself had rested quietly within its earlier limits between the Channel and the Thames. Under the great-grandson of Hengest, however, ^Ethel- berht, who was born in the year of the fall of Sor- biodunum, and who mounted its throne as a child a little later, it again came boldly to the front. 4 Narrow 1 " Good reasons may be given for the belief that even London itself for a while lay desolate and uninhabited " (Guest, " Conquest of Severn Valley," Archaeol. Journal, xix. 217). 2 In 604 it was in the hands of King Saeberct of Essex : " Orienta- lium Saxonum . . . quorum metropolis Lundonia civitas est " (Baeda, Hist. Eccl. ii. 3). And it passed into those of his sons (ibid. ii. 5). 3 The settlers in the district west of London are known after- wards as the Middle Saxons. But that they were only an offshoot of the East Saxons is clear from the fact that, with London, they always belonged to the kingdom of Essex, and that Middlesex still forms a part of the East-Saxon bishopric of London. * The date of yEthelberht's birth is given in the English Chron- icle, a. 552 (in the late Canterbury copy). Baeda says that at his death, in 616, "regnum . . . quinquaginta et sex annis gloriosissime tenuerat" (Hist. Eccl. ii. 5), which fixes his accession in 560. He was thus only eight years old when he became king, and sixteen when he fought at Wimbledon. io 8 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap, in. as were its bounds, indeed, Kent equalled in political conquests power the wider realms which were forming about Saxons, it. It remained, as of old, one of the wealthiest and c 500^577. most: flourishing parts of Britain. The ruin of Hen- — gest's wars had been in some part repaired by the peace which had existed since its conquest a hun- dred years ago ; for while the Gwent and the Thames valley were still being wasted with fight and ravage, the Cant-wara were settling quietly down into busy husbandmen along its coast, or on its downs, or in the fertile bottoms of the river -valleys that cleft them. It was a sign of this tranquillity that the district had, even before /Ethelberht's day, resumed that intercourse with the Continent which the de- scent of the Jutes had for a while broken off; and that only a few years later we find men versed in the English tongue, the result of a commerce which must have again sprung to life ready at hand in the ports of Gaul. 1 Kent and With wealth and strength drawn from a century of peace, as well as with the pride which it drew from the memory of its earlier share in the conquest of Britain, Kent hardly needed any other stimulus to nerve it to efforts for a wider sway. But when /Ethelberht looked out from his petty realm with dreams of sharing in the general advance of his race, the boy-king found himself shut in on every side save one by English ground. To the southwest lay Sussex and the Andredsweald ; to the north, over the Thames, lay the land of the East Saxons ; and only directly to the west, between the north downs and 1 Baeda, Hist. Eccl. i. 25. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 1Q g the Thames, did any tract of British country offer chap. m. itself to his arms. In this quarter the Jutes had comiuests been baffled for a hundred years by the barriers in saxons. their way, by the wooded fastnesses of the Dulwich c 5( ^7 577 heights, the tangled swamp which stretched from — these heights to the Thames, and the forces which would pour from London across its bridge to the suburb that occupied the site of the future South- wark. From the line of the Medway the West- Kentish warriors had crept forward along the strip of shore between Blackheath and the Thames, past Woolwich and Greenwich, to the edge of this mo- rass ; but here the border - line of Kent marks the limit of their advance. Nothing but the fall of the great city could remove the hindrance from their path ; and we can hardly err in believing that it was the capture of London by the East Saxons which at last enabled the Jutes to force their way across the border, and to march in 568 on the tract to the west. 1 . But i^Ethelberht had hardly struggled through the Westsax- marshes and entered on this long- coveted district slkhJster. when his progress was again roughly barred. He found himself face to face, not with the British, but with an English foe ; for the conquests of the West Saxons had brought them, as we have seen, to the western extremity of the very tract on which yEthel- berht was advancing from the east. Their overrun- ning of Berkshire and the Marlborough Downs had carried them to the border of the Thames valley, and the course of the great river led them forward 1 E. Chron. a. 568. I IO THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. to the country along its banks. Only one obstacle conquests lay in their path. Of the ring of fortresses that en- saxons. closed the Gwent, Calleva Atrebatum, the modern c 500^577 Silchester, which stood on the edge of the upland — where the roads from Winchester and Old Sarum united on their way to Lonaon, alone remained in British hands. Silchester 1 presented a marked con- trast to the towns which the Gewissas had as yet at- tacked. The fortresses of the Saxon Shore had been built simply as fortresses, and their small walled citadels stood apart from the general mass of habita- 1 For Silchester, see paper by Mr. Joyce, Archaeol. Journal, xxx. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 11Z tions near them. In towns such as York, on the chap. m. other hand, we see the first military settlement of conquests the Roman conquest rising within the earlier walls, sUonl but at last so utterly outgrowing them that the bulk c 5 ^I 577 of the town lay in undefended suburbs, and the walled — city contained little more than the quarters of troops and officials. Silchester belongs to neither of these classes. Originally the seat of a British tribe, its position in the heart of the island had deprived it of any military importance during the earlier ages of the Roman occupation, while it sheltered the town from the border forays that alone broke the Roman peace. It was not till the decay of the Empire brought trouble at last to its gates that inland towns, such as Calleva, were compelled to seek shelter in a ring of walls, and within these walls the whole town was naturally enclosed. It is this cause which ac- counts for the disproportion between the walled area of one town and another in Roman Britain, between the few acres enclosed by the walls of York and the space enclosed by the walls of Silchester or London. The circuit of the walls of Silchester is about three miles round ; and their irregular and polygonal form, if we compare it with the regular quadrangle of ■Richborough or Lincoln, shows that Calleva was a fortified city, and not a city which had grown up within or around a fortress. Mutilated and broken down as it is, the wall, with the wide ditch that still partially encircles it, enables us to realize the mili- tary strength of the town. In the midst of its net- work of narrow streets lay a central forum, round which stood the public offices and principal shops of the place ; while one side was wholly occupied by a II2 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. huge basilica, or justice-hall, whose central nave was conquests sustained by two rows of stately Corinthian pillars, saxons. and closed at each end by a lordly apse. Remains c. 500^577 sucn as these show that the Roman tradition was — still strong among the citizens of Calleva ; and it may have been with the Roman eagle at their head, and in the Roman order, that its men marched against the West Saxons. But all was in vain. We know nothing of the rout of the burghers, or of the siege and ruin of their town. It is only the discovery of a legionary eagle, hidden away, as it would seem, in some secret recess, and there buried for ages be- neath the charred wreck of one of its houses, that tells its own pathetic tale of the fall of Silchester. 1 Battk of The fall of this city opened to the West Saxons Wimble- £ • i i i • don. the road to the westy Joy its capture they had, in fact, turned the flank of the Andredsweald. The impenetrable tract whose scrub and forest and clay bottoms had so long held the assailants of Southern Britain at bay lay between the two lines of chalk uplands, the south downs , and the north downs, which diverged from the Gwent, on which the West Saxons had stood so long. But the capture of Cal- leva brought them fairly round the extremity of the Andredsweald, and opened for them the tract that lay between the north downs and the Thames. From Silchester a road led through the heart of this tract to the south of the Bearrocwood, which rilled the bend of the river about Windsor, traversed the wild heaths of Bagshot — then, as for ages later, a lonely stretch of heather and sand — and, dipping into 1 Joyce, " Silchester," Archaeol. Journal, xxx. 25. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. ! ! -, the marshes that still leave their trace on the see- chap.mii. nery about Weybridge, pushed through the thick conquests woodlands which hid the gentle windings of the saxons. lower Mole 1 till it reached a little town which oc- c . 5 ^I 577- cupied the site of our Kingston. 2 Here the road — crossed the Thames by a ferry, to strike along its northern bank towards London ; and that the West Saxons made no attempt to follow its course across the river adds force to the supposition that the city and the district about it were already in English hands. 3 But even in the country between the Thames and the downs their way was barred by an English rival. Right in their path, as they lay at Kingston, stretched the low rise of a broad, open heath, which extended from the river's brink at Put- ney 4 to the height or dun which was to be known from some later settler as Wibba's dun, or Wimble- don. The heath was studded with barrows that marked it as the scene of earlier conflicts ; and an older entrenchment, which covered seven acres of its surface, may have been occupied by the forces under ./Ethelberht. But a century of peace had left the Jutes no match for veterans who were fresh from the long strife about the Gwent. The encounter of 568 was memorable as the first fight of Englishmen with 1 The local names show how thickly this district was wooded. 2 Numerous remains have been found, which prove that a Roman station existed at Kingston. 3 That they had no objection to crossing the river in itself is clear from the fact that they crossed it but a few years later into the ter- ritory of the Four Towns. This was British soil ; and had our Middlesex been British soil, they would as naturally have crossed at Kingston. 4 The older form of this name, Putten-heath, tells its own tale. II4 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap^iii. Englishmen on British soil ; ' but the day went Conquests against the young Kentish king : his army was Saxons, thrown back across the Wandle on its own border, c. 500^577. an d the disputed district, the Surrey of after-days,' became from that moment a land of the West Saxons. TownT Only one portion of the Thames valley now re- mained in British hands, the tract along its northern bank from the Chilterns to the Cotswolds ; and it was into the heart of this district that the West- Saxons penetrated as soon as they had mastered Surrey. Close over against their settlements in Berkshire lay a region which was subject to four British towns, now known to us only by their later names of Eynsham, Bensington, Aylesbury, and Len- borough, the last of these a small hamlet near the present Buckingham. 2 The district comprised, in fact, the valleys of the Thame and the Cherwell, as well as of a few streams yet further to the westward, such as the W T oodrush, the Evenlode, and the Lech ; while to northward it stretched across the bounds of the Thames basin into the basin of the Wash, and reached in a narrow strip to the Ouse. It lay within a natural framework of river and woodland that marked it off from the rest of Britain. On the east- ern side ran the escarpment of the Chilterns, whose chalk downs were covered with scrub and brush- wood as well as broken with deep bottoms, which made them for hundreds of years to come almost impenetrable to an army, and which effectually shel- tered this tract from any aggression on the part of 1 E. Chron. a. 568. 2 E. Chron. a. 571. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 115 the Middle Saxons. To the west, between the dis- chap, m. trict of the Four Towns and the slopes of the Cots- conquests wolds, ran a line of woodlands and marshes that saxons. have left their traces in Wychwood and Canbury c> 5 ^jl 5rr< Forest, and in the tangled and difficult channels of the streams which drain them. These lines of de- fence drew together to the northward, and were linked by the woodlands about Towcester and the marshy meadows of the Ouse ; while along the south- ern border of the district ran the Thames, then a deeper and more rapid river than now, guarded from near the site of the present Oxford to that of Abingdon by almost impenetrable woods, and along the bend from Goring to Henley by the fastness of the Chiltern hills. As one looks westward from the Chilterns now-^«>&- adays over Aylesbury Vale, the district of the Four Towns stretches away in undulating reaches of green meadow-land, dotted with hamlets and homesteads that nestle beneath copses and tree-clumps, the clay bottom of some primeval sea out of which low lifts of oolite rise at Aylesbury and Brill. Then, as now, the country was fertile and well peopled. The river Thame, which flows through the heart of it, gathers its waters from the Chiltern slopes, and, running westward till it passes the little town to which it gives its name, turns from that point abruptly to the south by Chalgrove Field to the Thames. On the upper waters of the stream lay a town which is represented by our Aylesbury, crowning with the church, or Egiwys, 1 to which it possibly owed its 1 Another derivation is from ^Egil, the sun-archer of Teutonic mythology. n6 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. English name, a low rise of oolite that commanded conquests the district from the base of the Chilterns as far as saxons. the town of Thame. A line running close beside c 500^577 Thame marks the present shire line between Buck- — ingham and Oxfordshire, as it may then have marked the boundary between the territory that owned the rule of Aylesbury and that which owned the rule of Bensington. The district of this last town would thus comprise the lower valley of the Thame, with the country along the Thames, into which it falls, from the edge of the Chilterns to its bend north- ward towards Oxford, and would cover much the same ground as the southeastern portion of the present Oxfordshire. The western portion of the same county seems to be coextensive with the dis- trict of Eynsham, the country of the Cherwell val- ley from Banbury to Oxford, a district bounded westward by the woods and marshes of the present Gloucestershire border, parted from that of Bensing- ton perhaps by the rise of Shotover, and touching the districts of Aylesbury and Buckingham to the east in an irregular line, of which Brill may have been an outpost. The district of Lenborough or Buckingham, which lay along the Ouse to the north of its three confederates, possibly reached eastward as far as the quiet meadows of Cowper's Olney and the limits of Bedford, and was bounded in other di- rections by the territories of Towcester and Ayles- bury. 1 1 I have been guided, in tracing these boundaries, by the lie of the ground itself, and what we know of its natural features at this time, as well as by the limits of the actual shires. But a more careful examination of the local "dykes," etc., is needed before one can THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. n y It was from the south that the West Saxons struck chap. m. this country of the Four Towns. The conquests of conquests Cynric had planted them, as we have seen, on the saxons. Ilsley and Marlborough Downs ; in other words, on c 5 ^T 577< the westernmost portion of the chalk range that, ~ starting from the Gwent of Hampshire, runs by icknieid these downs and the Chilterns to the uplands of East Anglia. Along the base of the slopes in which this range fronts the lower country to the north ran one of the earliest lines of British communication. Its name of the Icknieid Way connects this road with the Iceni, whom the Romans found settled in our Norfolk and Suffolk, and points back to days in which this tribe stood supreme in Southeastern Britain, and when the road served as their line of traffic and of military communication with the Gwent of Hampshire and the mining district of Cornwall. 1 Seldom climbing to the crest of the down, and equal- ly avoiding the deep bottoms beneath the slopes of the escarpment, its course recalls a time when the wayfarer shrank equally from the dangers of the open country and from the thickets and marshes which made the lower grounds all but impassable. arrive at more than probable conclusions on the subject. It is needful, too, to bear in mind that the shires of this district probably owe their actual form to administrative arrangements of the tenth century ; and that though they may have preserved the boundaries of older tribal divisions, they do not everywhere exactly coincide with them. Thus, part of the present Hertfordshire, as the dio- cesan limits show, belonged originally to the district of the Four Towns, and remained West Saxon till the establishment of the Danelagh. Bedfordshire, again, is made up of more than the dis- trict of the " Bedecanford " of Cuthwulf 's day. 1 For the Icknieid Way, see Guest, " Four Roman Ways," Archaeol. Journal, xiv. 109. Ug THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. The road long remained one of the main thorough- conquests fares of the island ; pilgrims from the west traversed s°axons. it throughout the Middle Ages on their way to the z^r^ shrine of St. Edmund at Bury; and but two cen- C. OUU-077. t J — turies ago lines of pack-horses carried along it bales of woollen goods from the manufacturing towns of the eastern counties. B Bedfo7°d ^ was a l° n g the Icknield Way, therefore, that the West Saxons would naturally have pushed into the heart of the island. But their advance had been brought to a standstill by a sudden gap in the line of heights — the gap through which the Thames, turn- ing abruptly to the south, cuts its way through the downs to its lower valley and the sea. It was this obstacle of the great river which had bent them to their march along its southern bank and their con- quest of Surrey. But Surrey once won, their ad- vance along the line of the chalk downs was re- sumed ; and the barrier of the river was forced at a spot whose name preserves for us the memory of the invaders. Just before the Thames enters the gap beneath the Chilterns, the Icknield Way crossed it by a ford, which was recognized for a thousand years as the main pass across the river. Here prob- ably the -Romans first crossed into Mid- Britain, and it was by the same point that the Norman con- queror made his way after Hastings into the heart of the island. W T ith the single exception, indeed, of Halliford, near the Conway Stakes, this was the low- est point in its course in which the Thames, under its then tidal conditions, could be forded at all. 1 It 1 Guest, " Campaign of Aulus Plautius," Archseol. Journal, xxiii. 163, 165, 175. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 119 was by this ford, the Wallingford, or Ford of the chap^ii. Wealhas 2 or Welshmen, as the conquerors called it, conquests that the West Sexe must have passed the river in saxonl 5 7 1. 2 Their leader was Cuthwulf, another son of c 5( ^7 g77 Cynric, a brother of Ceawlin and Cutha, eager, it may be, to rival the achievements of his father and brother in war. Of the events of this campaign, however, we know but one, the battle with which it closed. From the spot at which it was fought, it seems as if Cuthwulf's raid had carried him from Wallingford by the Icknield Way along the western slope of the Chilterns as far as Bedford before the forces of the Four Towns could gather at the news of the foray, intercept him as he fell back from the valley of the Ouse, and force him to an engagement. 3 But whatever were the circumstances which brought about the battle, victory fell, as of old, to the free- booters, and the success of Cuthwulf's men was fol- lowed by the ruin of the Four Towns of the league. The last raid of the West Saxons had brought Halt of West Sax- them to the verge of Mid- Britain. That they paused om. at this point in their advance to the north, and that the upper Ouse at Bedford remained the boundary of their conquests in this quarter, may probably be explained, like their previous turning -away from London, by the fact that the country which they had reached was already in the hands of English- 1 It was by this name, which means " strangers," or " unintelli- gible people," that the English knew the Britons; and it is the name by which the Britons, oddly enough, now know themselves. 2 " The name of the earlier conquerors still lives in the neighbor- ing Englefield " (Freeman, Norman Conquest, iii. 542). 3 E. Chron. a. 571 ; Guest, E. E. Sett. p. 71. 120 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap^iii. men. No written record, indeed, fixes the dates of conquests the winning of Central Britain ; but the halt of saxons. Cuthwulf is a significant one. In the years that c. 500^577. followed the victory of 571 the West Saxons must have spread over the country they had won, over an area which roughly corresponds to that of the shires EAST BRITAIN Roman names VERULAMIUM English AEGELES BURH Modern Gnihnmichestar Cr-}),-^, Euplish Miies a ^ u: ia. Stanford* Geographical EstabU of Oxford, Bedford, and Bucks. To the eastward, therefore, their settlements were pushed along the clay flats of the upper Ouse, along the valley which lies between the chalk ranges of the Chilterns and the oolitic upland of our Northamptonshire. On the Chilterns, as we know, the East Saxons had for THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. J2I some while been settled about Hertford ; but that chap. m. the West Sexe made no effort to push further to the conquests east can only be explained by the presence of other gaxons. Englishmen in that quarter. No natural obstacles c 5( ^7 577 arrested their march along the Ouse ; neither forest — nor hill forced them to halt at the point in its course which is marked by the little town of St. Neots, or to draw their border-line from it along such lines as the little stream of the Kym. 1 We can only account for such a halt by supposing that, across this border- line on the course of the lower Ouse, the ground which now forms our Huntingdonshire had been occupied before 571 by the Engle folk whom we find in later days settled there. That the Ensile were at the same time masters of At i ack on & _ Severn the upland which stretched like a bar across Cuth- vaUe y- wulf's Road to the north is less certain ; for in this quarter, as we have seen, the dense screen of forests along the southern slopes of Northamptonshire might of themselves have held the West Saxons at bay. But the conquest of the Trent valley must now have been going on ; and the presence of Englishmen on the northern upland is the best explanation of the sudden wheel which the West Saxons now made to the west. Directly westward, indeed, they were still not as yet to press ; for the woods of Dorsetshire baffled them, and those of the Frome valley long proved a protection to the Britons of Somerset. Nor, for reasons we are less able to discover, did they push up the oolitic slopes from our Oxford- 1 I do not rely wholly on the fact of the present shire line ; for here language serves as a more definite boundary. Bedfordshire men still speak a Saxon, Huntingdon and Northamptonshire folk speak an Engle, dialect. 122 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. shire to the brow of the Cotswolds, where the town conquests of Corinium challenged their arms. It may have of the Saxons, been that the tangled streams, the woodlands, and c. 500^577. tne P ass over ^ e Thames at Lechlade, which pro- — tected this district, were still held too strongly by Stanford* Geographical Estabt the forces of the city. But on their northwestern border, in the interval between these lines of attack, lay a third line which was guarded by no such bar- riers, the line of the lower Severn valley, and it was on this tract that the West Sexe poured from the THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 12 % Wiltshire Downs in 577. 1 The country was richer chap. m. than any they had as yet traversed. Nowhere do conquests the remains of both private and public buildings saxons. show greater wealth and refinement than at Corin- c 5( ^ 577 ium, the chief town of the Cotswolds, which stood on the site of our Cirencester, and which was sur- passed in wealth and importance among its fellow- towns only by York, London, and Colchester. 2 Be- low the Cotswolds, in the valley of the Severn, Gle- vum, the predecessor of our Gloucester, though small- er in size, was equally important from its position at the head of the estuary, and from its neighborhood to the iron-works of the forest of Dean. Less than these in extent, but conspicuous from the grandeur of its public buildings, Bath was then, as in later times, the fashionable resort of the gouty provincial. Its hot springs were covered by a colonnade which lasted down to almost recent times ; and its local deity, Sul, may still have found worshippers in the lordly temple whose fragments are found among its ruins. 3 The territory of the three towns shows their power, for it comprised the whole district of the Cotswolds and the lower Severn, with a large part of what is now Northern Somersetshire. It stretched, therefore, from Mendip on the south as far north- ward as the forest which then covered almost the whole of Worcestershire. This fertile district was 1 As to this inroad, I follow, in the main, Dr. Guest's paper, " On the English Conquest of the Severn Valley," Archaeol. Journal, xix. 195. 2 Guest, " Conquest of Severn Valley," Archaeol. Journal, xix. 195. For Corinium, see paper by Mr. Tucker, Archaeol. Journal, vi. 321. The modern Cirencester "does not occupy more than one third of the area of the Roman city." 3 The Roman remains at Bath have Been described by Mr. Scarth in numerous papers, some of which may be found in the Proceed- ings of the Somerset Archaeological Society. I2 a THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. thickly set with the country-houses and estates of conquests the wealthier provincials. On either side of a road saxons. that runs through the heart of it, from Cirencester c 500^577 to Aust Passage over the Severn, as well as along — the roads which linked the three cities together, these mansions stood thickly ; and that of Wood- chester is, perhaps, the largest and most magnificent whose remains have as yet been found in Britain. 1 Two courts, round which ran the farm buildings and domestic buildings of the house, covered an area five hundred feet deep and three hundred broad. Every colonnade and passage had its tessellated pavement ; marble statues stood out from the gayly painted walls ; while pictures of Orpheus and Pan gleamed from amid the fanciful scroll-work and fret- work of its mosaic floors. Battle of it W as from houses such as these, and from the three cities to which they clung, that the army gath- ered which met the West Saxons under Ceawlin as they pushed over the Cotswolds into the valley of the Severn. But the old municipal independence seems to have been passing away. The record of the battle in the Chronicle of the conquerors con- nects the three cities with three kings ; and from the Celtic names of these kings, Conmael, Condidan or Kyndylan, and Farinmael, we may infer that the Roman town party, which had once been strong enough to raise Aurelius to the throne of Britain, was now driven to bow to the supremacy of native chieftains. 2 It was the forces of these kings that met Ceawlin at Deorham, a village which lies north- 1 Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, pp. 229-240. 2 E. Chron. a. 577. Guest, " Conquest of Severn Valley," Archseol. Journal, xix. 194. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. l2 $ ward of Bath on a chain of hills overlooking the CHAP - *"• Severn valley, and whose defeat threw open the conquests country of the three towns to the West-Saxon arms, saxons. Through the three years that followed, the invaders c 5 ^ 77# must have been spreading over the district which this victory made their own. Westward, if Welsh legend is to be trusted, their forays reached across the Severn as far as the Wye. 1 To the south they seem to have pushed across the Avon past the site of the future Bristol, and over the limestone mass of Mendip, whence they drove off in flight the lead- miners who have left their cinder- heaps along its crest, till they were checked in their progress by the marshes of Glastonbury. 2 In the southwest they were unable to dislodge the Britons from the forest of Braden, the woodland that filled the Frome val- ley; and this wedge of unconquered ground ran up for the next hundred years into the heart of their territory. But in the rich tract along the lower Severn which the site of their victory overlooked their settlements lay thick. Here, in the present Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, the settlers bore the name of the Hwiccas, 3 a name which took a yet 1 Guest, " Conquest of Severn Valley," Archaeol. Journal, xix. 195. 2 Guest, "Welsh and English in Somerset," Archaeol. Journal, xvi. 109-117. 3 Theodore set the "bishop of the Hwiccas" at Worcester; and his diocese included both the counties of Worcester and Gloucester as well as the adjacent districts. This seems to prove that " Hwic- can " was the older name for the settlers along the whole of the lower Severn, the Cotswolds above it, and Southern Warwickshire ; and Florence (a. 897) places Cirencester " in meridionali parte Wic- ciorum " — which would confirm this. Earle, "Local Names of Gloucestershire," Archaeol. Journal, xix. 51, 52, connects the name 126 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. in. wider range as from the valley of the Severn the in- conquests vaders spread over the upland of the Cotswolds to saxons. settle round the fallen Corinium, and found homes b 500^577 a l° n g the southern skirts of the forest of Arden. with our Wychwood, spelled in 841 " Hwicce-wudu," and which, though in Oxfordshire, is within a short distance of Gloucestershire, and marks the water-shed between the Severn and the Thames. He seems, however, to limit the Hwiccas to Gloucestershire, and to give Worcestershire to the Magesaetas, whom Mr. Freeman places in Herefordshire and Shropshire (Norman Conquest, i. 561). Staiiferd't Gecjraphicat Eitaiif THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 127 CHAPTER IV. THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CONQUERORS. With the battle of Deorham and the winning of The age of settlement, the lower Severn valley, we enter on a new age of our history. The conquest, indeed, was far from being complete ; for when Ceawlin paused in his ca- reer of victory, half the island still remained un- conquered, and the border-line of the invaders ran roughly along the rise that parts the waters of Brit- ain, from Ettrick across Cheviot, along the Yorkshire moors to the Peak of Derbyshire, thence by the skirts of Arden to the mouth of Severn, and across the estuary of that river, by Mendip, through the woods of Dorset to the sea. But the country within this line comprised all that was really worth win- ning, for the wild land to westward and northward had little to tempt an invader. Though the tide of invasion, therefore, still crept on, it crept on slowly and uncertainly ; and from this time the - energies of the conquerors were mainly absorbed, not in winning fresh land, but in settling in the land they had won. We pass, then, from an age of conquest to an age of settlement. But, dim as was the light that guided us through much of our earlier story, it is bright be- side the darkness that wraps the first upgrowth of English life on British soil. No written record tells us how Saxon or Engle dealt with the land he had I2 g THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. chap. iv. made his own ; how he drove out its older inhabi- The settle- tants, or how he shared it among the new ; how the thereon- settlers settled down in township or thorpe, or how querors. they moulded into shape, under changed conditions, the life they had brought with them from German shores. Even legend and tradition are silent as to their settlement. It is only by help of the few traces of this older life which remains embedded in custom or in law, or in later verse, that we can sketch its outlines, and such a sketch must necessarily be dim and incomplete. Weakness ^he character of the settlement was in great of English _ # attack, measure determined by that of the conquest itself; as that of the conquest was determined by the main characteristics which distinguished the winning of Britain from the winning of the other Western prov- inces of the Empire. The first of these was the comparative weakness of the attack. Nowhere had the barbaric force been so small or its onset so fit- ful. Difficulties of transport made attack by sea less easy than attack by land ; and the warriors who were brought across the Channel or the German Ocean by the boats of Hengest and Cerdic must have been few beside the hosts who followed Alboin or Chlodowig over the .Alps or the Rhine. The story of the conquest confirms the English tradition that the invaders of Britain landed in small parties, and that they were only gradually reinforced by after-comers. Nor was there any joint action among the assailants to compensate for the smallness of their numbers. 1 Though all spoke the same lan- 1 Stubbs, Constit. Hist. i. 67. THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 129 guage and used the same laws, they had no such CHAP - IV - bond of political union as the Franks; and, though The settie- all were bent on winning the same land, each band the c