PROSE READINGS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY. PART I. I. THE EARLY ENGLISHMEN. GREEN. [Britain, or the island in which we live, was first made known to the civilized world by a Roman General, Julius Cæsar, in the year 55 before the birth of Christ. Cæsar had conquered Gaul, a country which included our present France and Belgium, and brought it under the rule of Rome; but in the course of his conquest he learned that to the west of Gaul lay an island named Britain, whose peoples were mainly of the same race with the Gauls and gave them help in their struggles against the Roman. armies. He resolved therefore to invade Britain; and in two successive descents he landed on its shores, defeated the Britons, and penetrated at last beyond the Thames. No event in history is more memorable than this landing of Cæsar. In it the greatest man of the Roman race made known to the world a land whose people in the after-time were to recall, both in their temper and in the breadth of their rule, the temper and empire of Rome. Cæsar however was recalled from Britain by risings in Gaul; and for a hundred years more the island remained unconquered. It was not till the time of the Emperor $ B Claudius that its conquest was again undertaken; and a war which only ended under the Emperor Domitian at last brought all the southern part of the island under the rule of Rome. Britain remained a province of the Roman Empire for more than three hundred years. During this time its tribes were reduced to order, the land was civilized, towns were built, roads made from one end of the island to the other, mines were opened, and London grew into one of the great ports of the world. But much oppression was mingled with this work of progress, and throughout these centuries the province was wasted from time to time by inroads of the unconquered Britons of the north, whose attacks grew more formidable as Rome grew weaker in her struggle against the barbarians who beset her on every border. At last the Empire was forced to withdraw its troops from Britain, and to leave the province to defend itself against its foes. To aid in doing this, the Britons called in bands of soldiers from northern Germany, who gradually grew into a host of invaders, and became in turn a danger to the island. These were our forefathers, the first Englishmen who set foot in Britain.] FOR the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or England lay within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas.1 Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district however seem to have been merely an outlying fragment of what was called the The peninsula of Sleswick-Holstein and of Jutland. Engle or English folk, the bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung. The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them to take part in the general attack of the German race on the empire of Rome.3 For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with tribe, and village with village; even within the township itself feuds parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of fighting 2 Teutonic is the general name for all branches of the German race, either in Germany or elsewhere. 3 In the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ the Empire of Rome was attacked by the German peoples, who overran most of its provinces in the west, and founded new nations there. Thus the Franks conquered Gaul, the Lombards northern Italy; and made them France and Lombardy. men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's "shield-play." and "sword-game"; the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush of the host and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons, helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax,.the short broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his sea-craft as of his warcraft; sword in teeth he plunged into the sea to meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird" as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan as its curved prow breasted the "swan-road" of the sea. Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they 4 Gleeman is the old English name for minstrel. |