CHAPTER II.

THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT IN BRITAIN.

WHEN the Roman soldiers were gone, the Romanized Britons did their best to maintain their independence; but they were unaccustomed to fighting, and had much ado to repel their countrymen from the hills, and the Picts and Scots from beyond the wall.

The English

These, however, were not their only enemies, for they were soon attacked by the English; and in the course of two hundred years the new-comers wrested from the Romanized Britons invasion. all the fertile parts of the island. Only one writer. Gildas, was living when the conquest was taking place, and he tells us very little, so that we are obliged to rely upon historians who lived long after the events which they profess to relate. By them we are told that the Britons called in the English to help them against the Picts and Scots, that the English turned upon their employers, and, assisted by thousands of their countrymen, conquered large districts in Britain. The dates of these conquests are given. The kingdom of Kent is said to have been founded in 449, Sussex in 477, Wessex in 495, and Northumbria in 547. As a matter of fact, however, it is impossible to give any detailed account of the conquest. These writers tell us mainly about the south coast; they give hardly anything about Northumbria, and nothing at all about the conquest of the great midland kingdom of Mercia.

Facts of the

The researches of modern historians have, however, done much to clear up the matter, and the main features of the invasions are now well known. The English, under which name invasion. are included three tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, were a Low German race who lived in the neighbourhood of the mouth of the Elbe. They were much given to plunder

and piracy, and in Roman times were known, under the name of Saxons, as the scourge of the North Sea and the British Channel. When Britain was left defenceless, they required no invitation to land and attack the inhabitants. Wherever there was a convenient port, thither they steered their ships, and, if they could master the inhabitants, began a settlement, just as their descendants did hundreds of years afterwards on the coast of North America.

The English settlements.

These settlements were dotted all along the British coast from the Firth of Forth to the Southampton Water, and each became a little kingdom. Between the mouths of the Forth and Tyne we find the Bernicians; between the Tyne and the Humber the Deirans; then the Lindiswaras between the Humber and the Wash; then the East Anglians between the Wash and Harwich; and the East Saxons, who were bounded on the south by the Thames. Crossing that river, we come in turn to the Kentishmen, the South Saxons, a small group of Jutes near Southampton Water, and finally to the land of the West Saxons, or Wessex.

These tribes spread inland, and conquered the country from the Britons, but how far they killed off the old inhabitants, drove them away, or reduced them to slavery, it is not easy to Method of the say. It is certain, however, that at first, when the conquest. English were heathen, they simply pushed aside or slaughtered the Britons and took their place; but it is thought that, as they penetrated further into the country, few Britons survived where the fighting was severe, but many where large tracts were conquered by a single battle. The Britons who survived would be those in the large towns, and the agricultural labourers, who would naturally be preserved as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and for the purpose of cultivating the fields, which they could do much better than their English conquerors. Two things make it very hard to tell how many Britons survived. First, the Britons who came under the rule of the English completely gave up their own language and adopted that of their conquerors, just as the Gauls, when conquered by Cæsar, learned to speak Latin. Secondly, in the eastern parts of the island we have no traces of Christianity, though it survived in the west and in Wales. If we examine the names of places, we shall find that, with the exception of Roman names of towns and British names

Evidence of language, religion, and

names.

of rivers, we have hardly a single British or Roman name in the low-lying districts of the east and south; while directly we come to hilly country, British names are again found, such as Pen-yghent and Helvellyn. The language spoken in all low-lying districts is English, but we know that it is not long since Celtic was spoken in Cornwall, that it is still spoken in Wales, and large traces of Celtic can be found in the dialects of hilly districts.

The chief part of the conquest took place between the years 410 and 600, by which date the English had made themselves masters Chief battles of of all the fertile country in the south and east, and the conquest. the Britons only held possession of the mountainous and barren tracts of the west and north. They did not do this without hard fighting, and the struggle had the effect of uniting the Goidels and Brythons south of the wall, who began to call themselves by the name of Kymry, or comrades. Two battles, however, stand out plainly, and must be remembered. In the year 577 the West Saxons defeated the Britons at the battle of Dyrham, near Bath. The result of this victory was to separate the Britons of Cornwall from those of Wales. In the year 607, or 613, the Anglians of Northumbria defeated the Britons at the battle of Chester, and so cut off the Britons of Wales from those of Strathclyde, the hilly district which stretches from Morecambe Bay to the Firth of Clyde. The English, after this, began to call the men of Cornwall West Welsh, and those who lived between the Bristol Channel and the Dee, North Welsh. The word Welsh means foreigner.

The early settlements of the English seem to have been quite independent of one another; but no sooner had they gained a firm Early English footing, than the stronger kingdoms began to attack

kingdoms. and conquer the weaker. In this way Bernicia and Deira became united into Northumbria, with York as capital; Norfolk and Suffolk into East Anglia; the midland settlements from the fens to the Welsh border, and from the Humber to Watling Street, formed the kingdom of Mercia; while all the shires that lay between Watling Street and the south coast, except Kent and Sussex, fell under the power of the kings of Wessex, whose capital was Winchester. The period when Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex were the principal kingdoms is sometimes known as that of the seven kingdoms, or the Heptarchy.

In such a small country as England one or other of these kingdoms was sure to get the mastery over the others, but it was a good many years before all the land came under one king.

Christianity.

Teutonic settlements in Roman empire.

Long before this happened England was won back to Christianity. The English were heathens. They worshipped the powers of nature, such as Thor, the god of thunder; but they Conversion of had a special reverence for Woden, the leader of the the English to German race, whom the chiefs looked upon as their ancestor. They had many superstitions, but apparently no very strong religious beliefs. Such a people were sure to take kindly to Christianity, if it were presented to them in an attractive form. While the English had been conquering Roman Britain, other Teutonic races had been making themselves masters of portions of the Roman empire. The great difference between the English settlement in Britain, and the conquests of the Goths and the Franks, was this. The English kept their own religion and language, and Their converexterminated Christianity and the Celtic and Roman sion to Chrisspeeches; while the Goths and Franks did all they could to become Roman: they learnt to speak the Latin tongue, they followed Roman customs, and adopted Christianity. While this was going on, the power of the Bishop of Rome, afterwards called the pope, was growing fast. His ecclesiastical dominions coincide with the old boundaries of the Roman empire in the west. England, however, was still heathen, while the Christians of Wales, Strathclyde, and Ireland were cut off from his rule; so it was natural that he should wish to convert the English.

tianity.

Gregory's mission.

So little had been heard about Britain in the Roman empire, since it had been abandoned in 410, that one writer tells us that Britain was the abode of the souls of the dead, who were ferried across the Channel from the shores of France; and it is said that Gregory the Great, the pope who had the honour of sending the first missionaries to the English, was only reminded of its actual existence by noticing some Northumbrian captives exposed for sale in the slave-market at Rome. However this may be, Gregory determined on their conversion; and as he could not go himself, he sent Augustine, a monk, with a number of clergy, to England.

The time was favourable to his plan. Ethelbert, the King of the Kentishmen, had married the daughter of the King of Paris. Kent, Conversion of Owing to having been settled more than one hundred

Kent. years, was a well-organized kingdom, and its civilization had been improved by trade with the Continent. Encouraged by these circumstances, Augustine and his clergy paid a visit to the royal court at Canterbury. There they were graciously received by Ethelbert, who himself accepted Christianity, and gave his people leave to do the same. The Kentishmen adopted the new faith. Augustine was ordained Archbishop of the English Church; churches were built on new sites, or on the ruins of the old British churches, and two missionary bishops were consecrated for Essex and West Kent, whose sees were to be respectively London and Rochester. So the south-eastern corner of England was again restored to Christendom in the year 597. Augustine also tried to get the Welsh Christians to acknowledge his authority, but failed.

No other English kingdom received Christianity for thirty years; but after the death of Augustine, when Justus was Archbishop of Conversion of Canterbury, advantage was taken of the marriage Northumbria. of Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert, with Edwin, King of Northumbria, to send with her a missionary, Paullinus. By his preaching Edwin and his nobles were converted and baptized. Paullinus also converted Lincolnshire, then called Lindsey. Mercia, Wessex, Sussex, and all the smaller kingdoms, were as yet pagan.

Struggle for

While these events were in progress, the struggle between the kingdoms for the supremacy was still going on. Kent took the lead, under Ethelbert the Christian; but its power was supremacy. very short-lived, and the earliest king to get anything like a real supremacy was Edwin, King of Northumberland. This northern kingdom was very strong. It was not so civilized as Kent, but it was much larger. It first came to the front when its king, Ethelfrith, defeated the Welsh in the battle of Chester; but Edwin, when he had beaten the West Saxons, was stronger still, and possibly his marriage with Ethelburga was a sign of his superiority over Kent. The great rival of Northumbria was Mercia. Penda, its heathen king, allied with the Christian Welsh, and overthrew and slew Edwin at the battle of Hatfield,