The History of England | Page 2

Britons at least some acquaintance with the language, religion,
administration, and social and economic arrangements of the
conquerors. But, on the whole, the evidence points rather to military
occupation than to colonization; and the Roman province resembled
more nearly a German than a British colony of to-day. Rome had then
no surplus population with which to fill new territory; the only
emigrants were the soldiers, the officials, and a few traders or
prospectors; and of these most were partially Romanized provincials
from other parts of the empire, for a Roman soldier of the third century
A.D. was not generally a Roman or even an Italian. The imperial
government, moreover, considered the interests of Britain not in
themselves but only as subordinate to the empire, which any sort of
distinctive national organization would have threatened. This
distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rule in India; and if
the army in Britain gradually grew more British, it was due to the
weakness and not to the policy of the imperial government. There was
no attempt to form a British constitution, or weld British tribes into a
nation; for Rome brought to birth no daughter states, lest she should
dismember her all-embracing unity. So the nascent nations warred
within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and distracted by the struggle,
she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left it more cultivated, perhaps, but

more enervated and hardly stronger or more united than before.
Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans had
themselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend the
eastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; and it
was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles and
Saxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as it
was by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts and
Scots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitation
from the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied the
original impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea.
Whatever its origin--whether pressure from other tribes behind, internal
dissensions, or the economic necessities of a population growing too
fast for the produce of primitive farming--the restlessness was general;
but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over the Roman
frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic call to the
sea and the setting sun.
This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations should
wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes
transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths
of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we
are at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the
Angles at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out
from the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as
their descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and
the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered
Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which are
said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the
landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea
deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as
much as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to
dislodge them, and the absence of centralized government and national
consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and
Kent, east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the
next morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their
easy success led to imitation by their more numerous southern

neighbours, the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in
volume and rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the
rivers, and all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are
the home of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress
may be traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the
south the Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex,
and Wessex; in the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in
the north they retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The
districts in which they met and mingled have less distinctive names;
Surrey was perhaps disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms,
Hampshire between West Saxons, South Saxons, and Jutes; while in
the centre Mercia was a mixed march or borderland of Angles and
Saxons against the retiring Britons or Welsh.
It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the superiority
of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders,