anglo saxon britain english in their new homes

8/8/2019 Anglo Saxon Britain English in Their New Homes

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ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

CHAPTER VTHE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES.

IF any trust at all can be placed in the legends, a lullin the conquest followed the first settlement, and forsome fifty years the English-or at least the WestSaxons-were engaged in consolidating their owndominions, without making any further attack uponthose of the Welsh. I t may be well, therefore, toenquire what changes of manners had come over themin consequence of their change of place from theshores of the Baltic and the North Sea to those ofthe Channel and the German Ocean.As a whole, English society remained much thesame in Britain as it had been in Sleswick and NorthHolland. The English came over in a body, withtheir women and children, their flocks and herds,their goods and chattels. The peculiar breed ofcattle which they brought with them may still be distinguished in their remains from the earlier Celticshort horn associated with Roman ruins and prehistoric barrows, They came as settlers, not as meremarauders; and they remained banded together intheir original tribes and families after they hadoccupied the soil of Britain.From the moment of their landing in Britain the


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THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 41savage corsairs of the Sleswick fiats seem wholly tohave laid aside their seafaring habits. They built nomore ships, apparently; for many years after BishopWilfrith had to teach the South Saxons how to catchsea-fish; while during the early Danish incursions wehear distinctly that the English had no vessels; nor isthere much incidental mention of shipping betweenthe age of the settlement and that of .iElfred. Thenew-comers took up their abode at once on therichest parts of Roman Britain, and came into fullenjoyment of orchards which they had not plantedand fields which they had not sown. The state ofcultivation in which they found the vale ofYork andthe Kentish glens must have been widely differentfrom that to which they were accustomed in theirold heath-clad home. Accordingly, they settled downat once into farmers and landowners on a far largerscale than of yore; and they were not anxious tomove away from the rich lands which they had soeasily acquired. From being sailors and graziersthey took to be agriculturists and land men. In thetowns, indeed, they did not settle; and most ofthese continued to bear their old Roman or Celtictitles. A few may have been destroyed, especially inthe first onset, like Anderida, and, at a later date,Chester; but the greater number seem to have beenstill scantily inhabited, under English protection, by amixed urban population, mainly Celtic in blood, andknown by the name of Loegrians. I t was in thecountry, however, that the English conquerers tookup their abode. They were tillers of the soil, not


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42 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.merchants or skippers, and it was long before theyacquired a taste for urban life. The whole easternhalf of England is filled with villages bearing thecharacteristic English clan names, and marking eachthe home of a distinct family of early settlers. Assoon as the new-comers had burnt the villa of the oldRoman proprietor, and killed, driven out, or enslavedhis abandoned serfs, they took the land to themselvesand divided it out on their national system. Hencethe whole government and social organisation ofEngland is purely Teutonic, and the country evenlost its old name of Britain for its new one of England.

In England, as of old in Sleswick, the village community formed the unit of English society. Eachsuch township was still bounded by its mark of forest,mere, or fen, which divided it from its nearest neighbours. In each lived a single clan, supposed to beof kindred blood and bearing a common name. Themarksmen and their serfs, the latter being conqueredWelshmen, cultivated the soil under cereals for bread,and also for an unnecessarily large supply of beer, as welearn at a later date from numerous charters. Cattleand horses grazed in the pastures, while large herds ofpigs were kept in the forest which formed the mark.Thus the early English settled down at once from anation ofpirates into one of agriculturists. Here andthere, among the woods and fens which still covered alarge part of the country, their little separate communities rose in small fenced clearings or on iowislets, now joined by drainage to the mainland;while in the wider valleys, tilled in Roman times, the


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THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES 43wealthier chieftains formed their settlements andallotted lands to their Welsh tributaries. Manyfamily names appear in different parts of England, fora reason which will hereafter be explained. Thus wefind the Bassingas at Bassingbourn, in Cambridgeshire; at Bassingfield, in Notts; at Bassingham andBassingthorpe, in Lincolnshire; and at Bassington, inNorthumberland. The Billings have left their stampat Billing, in Northampton; Billingford, in Norfolk;Billingham, in Durham; Billingley, in yorkshire;Billinghurst, in Sussex; and five other places invarious other counties. Birmingham, Nottingham,Wellington, Faringdon, Warrington, and Wallingfordare well-known names formed on the same analogy.How thickly these clan settlements lie scattered overTeutonic England may be judged from the numberwhich occur in the London district alone-Kensington, Paddington, N otting-hill, Billingsgate, Islington,Newington, Kennington, Wapping, and Teddington.There are altogether 1,400 names of this type inEngland. Their value as a test of Teutonic colonisation is shown by the fact that while 48 occur in Northum berland, 127 in Yorkshire, 76 in Lincolnshire,153 in Norfolk and Suffolk, 48 in Essex, 60 in Kent,and 86 in Sussex and Surrey, only 2 are found in Cornwall,6 in Cumberland, 24 in Devon, 13 in Worcester,2 in Westmoreland, and none in Monmouth. Speaking generally, these clan names are thickest along theoriginal English coast, from Forth to Portland; theydecrease rapidly as we move inland.; and they dieaway altogether as we apprQach the purely Celtic west


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44 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.The English families, however, probably tilled the soilby the aid of Welsh slaves; indeed, in Anglo-Saxon,

the word serf and Welshman are used almost interchangeably as equivalent synonyms. But though manyWelshmen were doubtless spared from the very first,nothing is more certain than the fact that they becamethoroughly Anglicized. A few new words from Welshor Latin were introduced into the English tongue, butthey were far too few sensibly to affect its vocabulary.The language was and still is essentially Low German;and though it now contains numerous words of Latinor French origin, it does not and never did containany but the very smallest Celtic element. The slightnumber of additions made from the Welsh consistedchiefly of words connected with the higher Romancivilisation-such as wall, street, and chester-or thenew methods of agriculture which the Teuton learntfrom his more civilised serfs. The Celt has alwaysshown a great tendency to cast aside his nativelanguage in Gaul, in Spain, and in Ireland; and theisolation of the English townships must have had theeffect of greatly accelerating the process. Within afew generations the Celtic slave had forgotten histongue, his origin, and his religion, and had developedinto a pagan English ser Whatever else the Teutonic conquest did, it turned every man within theEnglish pale into a thorough Englishman.

But the removal to Britain effected one immensech;mge. "War begat the king." In Sleswick theEnglish had lived within their little marks as free andi n d ~ ' p e n d e n t communities. In Britain all the clans of


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THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 45each colony gradually carne under the military command of a king. The ealdormen who led the variousmarauding bands assumed royal power in the newcountry. Such a change was indeed inevitable. Fornot only had the English to win the new England, butthey had.also to keep it and extend it. During fourhundred years aconstant smouldering warfare wascarried on between the foreigners and the nativeWelsh on their western frontier. Thus the townshipsof each colony entered into a closer union with oneanother for military purposes, and so arose the separatechieftainships or petty kingdoms of early England.But the king's power was originally very small. Hewas merely the semi-hereditary general and representative of the people, of royal stock, but elected by thefree suffrages of the freemen. Only as the kingdomscoalesced, and as the powel of meeting became consequently less, did the king acquire his greater prerogatives. From the first, however, he se.ems to havepossessed the right of granting public lands, with theconsent of the freemen, to particular individuals; andsuch book-land, as the early English called it, afterthe introduction of Roman writing, became theorigin of our system of private property in land.Every township had its moot or assembly of freemen, which met around the sacred oak, or on someholy hill, or beside the great stone monument ofsome forgotten Celtic chieftain. Every hundred alsohad its moot, and many of these still survive in theiroriginal form to the present day, being held in theopen air, near some sacred site or conspicuous land-


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ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.mark. And the colony as a whole had also its moot,at which all freemen might attend, and which settledthe general affairs of the kingdom. At these lastnamed moots the kings were elected j and though theselection was practically confined to men of royal kin,the king nevertheless represented the free choice ofthe tribe. Before the conversion to Christianity, theroyal families all traced their origin to Woden. Thusthe pedigree of Ida, King of N orthumbria, runs asfollows : - " Ida was Eopping, Eoppa was Esing, Esawas Inguing, Ingui Angenwiting, Angenwit Alocing,Aloc Benocing, Benoc Branding, Brand Baldreging,Breldreg Wodening." But in later Christian timesthe chroniclers felt the necessity of reconciling theseheathen genealogies with the Scriptural account inGenesis j so they affiliated Woden himself upon theHebrew patriarchs. Thus the pedigree of the WestSaxon kings, inserted in the Chronicle under the year855, after conveying back the genealogy of LEthelwulfto Woden, continues to say, "Woden was Frealafing,Frealaf Finning," and so on till it reaches" Sceafing,id estjilius Noe j he was born in N oe's Ark. Lamech,Mathusalem, Enoc, Jared, Malalehel, Cam on, Enos,Seth, Adam, primus homo et pater !loster."The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Easternand Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous

heathen pirates. They massacred or enslaved thecivilised or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants withsavage ruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed themonuments of Roman occupation. They let the roadsand cities fall into utter disrepair. They stamped out


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THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES 47. Christianity with fire and sword from end to end of theirnew domain. They occupied a civiiised and Christianland, and they restored it to its primitive barbarism.Nor was there any improvement until Christianteachers from Rome and Scotland once more introduced the forgotten culture which the English pirateshad utterly destroyed. As Gildas phrases it, with trueCeltic eloquence, the red tongue of flame licked upthe whole land from end to end, till it slaked itshorrid thirst in the western ocean. For 150 yearsthe whole of English Britain, save, perhaps, Kent andLondon, was cut off from all intercourse withChristendom and the Roman world. The countryconsisted of several petty chieftainships, at constantfeud with their Teutonic neighbours, and perpetuallywaging a border war with Welsh, Picts, and Scots.Within each colony, much of the land remained untilled, while the clan settlements appeared like littleislands of cultivation in the midst of forest, waste, andcommon. The villages were mere groups of woodenhomesteads, with barns and cattle-sheds, surroundedby rough stockades, and destitute of roads or communications. Even the palace of the king was a longwooden hall with numerous outhouses; for theEnglish built no stone houses, and burnt down thoseof their Roman predecessors. Trade seems to havebeen confined to the south coast, and few manufactured articles of any sort were in use. The Englishdegraded their Celtic serfs to their own barbaric level ;and the very memory of Roman civilization almostdied out of the land for a hundred and fifty years.

anglo saxon britain english in their new homes

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