Europe and the Faith Part 11

The student of this main problem in European history, the fate of Britain, must particularly note the phenomenon here described. It is the capital point of proof that Roman Britain, though suffering grievously from the Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and Irish raids, and though cut off for a time from civilization, did survive.

Those who prefer to think of England as a colony of barbarians in which the European life was destroyed, have to suppress many a truth and to conceive many an absurdity in order to support their story; but no absurdity of theirs is _worse_ than the fiction they put forward with regard to the story of the English towns.

It was solemnly maintained by the Oxford School and its German masters that these great Roman towns, one after the other, were first utterly destroyed by the Pirates of the North Sea, then left in ruins for generations, and then _re-occupied_ through some sudden whim by the newcomers! It needs no historical learning to laugh at such a fancy; but historical learning makes it even more impossible than it is laughable.

Certain rare towns, of course, decayed in the course of centuries: the same is true, for that matter, of Spain and Gaul and Italy. Some few here (as many in Spain, in Gaul and in Italy) may have been actually destroyed in the act of war. There is tradition of something of the sort at Pevensey (the old port of Anderida in Suss.e.x) and for some time a forgery lent the same distinction to Wroxeter under the Wrekin. A great number of towns again (as in every other province of the Empire) naturally diminished with the effect of time. Dorchester on the Thames, for instance, seems to have been quite a large place for centuries after the first troubles with the pirates, though today it is only a village; but it did not decay as the result of war. Sundry small towns became smaller still, some few sank to hamlets as generation after generation of change pa.s.sed over them: but we find just the same thing in Picardy in the Roussillon, in Lombardy and in Aquitaine. What did _not_ happen in Britain was a subversion of the Roman munic.i.p.al system.

Again, the unwalled settlement outside the walled town often grew at the expense of the munic.i.p.ality within the walls. I have given Huntingdon as an example of this; and there is St. Albans, and Cambridge. But these also have their parallels in every other province of the West. Even in distant Africa you find exactly the same thing. You find it in the northern suburb of Roman Paris itself. That suburb turns into the head of the mediaeval town--yet Paris is perhaps the best example of Roman continuity in all Europe.

The seaports naturally changed in character and often in actual site, especially upon the flat, and therefore changeable, eastern sh.o.r.es--and that is exactly what you find in similar circ.u.mstances throughout the tidal waters of the Continent. There is not the shadow or the trace of any widespread destruction of the Roman towns in Britain. On the contrary there is, as much or more than elsewhere in the Empire, the obvious fact of their survival.

The phenomenon is the more remarkable when we consider first that the names of Roman towns given above do not pretend to be a complete list (one may add immediately from memory the southern Dorchester, Dover, Doncaster, etc.), and, secondly, that we have but a most imperfect list remaining of the towns in Roman Britain.

A common method among those who belittle the continuity of our civilization, is to deny a Roman origin to any town in which Roman remains do not happen to have been noted as yet by antiquarians. Even under that test we can be certain that Windsor, Lewes, Arundel, Dorking, and twenty others, were seats of Roman habitation, though the remaining records of the first four centuries tell us nothing of them. But in nine cases out of ten the mere absence of catalogued Roman remains proves nothing. The soil of towns is s.h.i.+fted and res.h.i.+fted continually generation after generation. The antiquary is not stationed at every digging of a foundation, or sinking of a well, or laying of a drain, or paving of a street. His methods are of recent establishment. We have lost centuries of research, and, even with all our modern interest in such matters, the antiquary is not informed once in a hundred times of chance discoveries, unless perhaps they be of coins.

When, moreover, we consider that for fifteen hundred years this turning and returning of the soil has been going on within the munic.i.p.alities, it is ridiculous to affirm that such a place as Oxford, for instance--a town of importance in the later Dark Ages--had no Roman root, simply because the modern antiquary is not yet possessed of any Roman remains recently discovered in it: there may have been no town here before the fifth century: but it is unlikely.

One further point must be noticed before we leave this prime matter: had there been any considerable destruction of the Roman towns in Britain, large and small, we should expect it where the pirate raids fell earliest and most fiercely. We should expect to find the towns near the east and the south coast to have disappeared. The historical truth is quite opposite.

The garrison of Anderida indeed and of Anderida alone (Pevensey) was, if we may trust a vague phrase written four hundred years later, ma.s.sacred in war. But Lincoln, York, Newcastle, Colchester, London, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, Portchester, Winchester, the very princ.i.p.al examples of survival, are all of them either right on the eastern and southern coast or within a day's striking distance of it.

As to decay, the great garrison centre of the Second Legion, in the heart of the country which the pirate raiders never reached, has sunk to be little Caerleon-upon-Usk, just as surely as Dorchester on the Thames, far away from the eastern coast, has decayed from a town to a village, and just as surely as Richboro', an island right on the pirate coast itself, has similarly decayed! As with destruction, so with decay, there is no increasing proportion as we go from the west eastward towards the Pirate settlements.

But the point need not be labored. The supposition that the Roman towns disappeared is no longer tenable, and the wonder is how so astonis.h.i.+ng an a.s.sertion should have lived even for a generation. The Roman towns survived, and, with them, Britain, though maimed.

(4) Now for the last question: what novel things had come in to Britain with this break down of the central Imperial authority in the fifth and sixth centuries? To answer that is, of course, to answer the chief question of all, and it is the most difficult of all to answer.

I have said that presumably on the South and East the language was new.

There were numerous Germanic troops permanently in Britain before the legions disappeared, there was a constant intercourse with Germanic auxiliaries: there were probably colonies, half military, half agricultural. Some have even thought that "Belgic" tribes, whether in Gaul or Britain, spoke Teutonic dialects; but it is safer to believe from the combined evidence of place names and of later traditions, that there was a real change in the common talk of most men within a march of the eastern sea or the estuaries of its rivers.

This change in language, if it occurred (and we must presume it did, though it is not absolutely certain, for there may have been a large amount of mixed German speech among the people before the Roman soldiers departed)--this change of language, I say, is the chief novel matter. The decay of religion means less, for when the pirate raids began, though the Empire was already officially Christian at its heart, the Church had only just taken firm root in the outlying parts.

The inst.i.tutions which arose in Britain everywhere when the central power of Rome decayed--the meetings of armed men to decide public affairs, money compensation for injuries, the organizing of society by "hundreds,"

etc., were common to all Europe. Nothing but ignorance can regard them as imported into Britain (or into Ireland or Brittany for that matter) by the Pirates of the North Sea. They are things native to all our European race when it lives simply. A little knowledge of Europe will teach us that there was nothing novel or peculiar in such customs. They appear universally among the Iberians as among the Celts, among the pure Germans beyond the Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians upon the delta of that river, and the lowlands of the Scheldt and the Meuse; even among the untouched Roman populations.

Everywhere you get, as the Dark Ages approach and advance, the meetings of armed men in council, the chieftain a.s.sisted in his government by such meetings, the weaponed a.s.sent or dissent of the great men in conference, the division of the land and people into "hundreds," the fine for murder, and all the rest of it.

Any man who says (and most men of the last generation said it) that among the changes of the two hundred years' gap was the introduction of novel inst.i.tutions peculiar to the Germans, is speaking in ignorance of the European unity and of that vast landscape of our civilization which every true historian should, however dimly, possess. The same things, talked of in a mixture of Germanic and Latin terms between Poole Harbour and the Ba.s.s Rock, were talked of in Celtic terms from the Start to Glasgow; the chroniclers wrote them down in Latin terms alone everywhere from the Sahara to the Grampians and from the Adriatic to the Atlantic. The very Basques, who were so soon to begin the resistance of Christendom against the Mohammedan in Spain, spoke of them in Basque terms. But the actual things--the inst.i.tutions--for which all these various Latins, Basque, German, and Celtic words stood (the blood-fine, the scale of money--reparation for injury, division of society into "hundreds," the Council advising the Chief, etc.) were much the same throughout the body of Europe. They will always reappear wherever men of our European race are thrown into small, warring communities, avid of combat, jealous of independence, organized under a military aristocracy and reverent of custom.

Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the Imperial measurements survived--the measurement of land, the units of money and of length and weight were all Roman, and nowhere more than in Eastern Britain during the Dark Ages.

Lastly, let the reader consider the curious point of language. No more striking _simulacrum_ of racial unity can be discovered than a common language or set of languages; but it is a _simulacrum_, and a _simulacrum_ only. It is neither a proof nor a product of true unity. Language pa.s.ses from conqueror to conquered, from conquered to conqueror, almost indifferently. Convenience, accident, and many a mysterious force which the historian cannot a.n.a.lyze, propagates it, or checks it. Gaul, thickly populated, organized by but a few garrisons of Roman soldiers and one army corps of occupation, learns to talk Latin universally, almost within living memory of the Roman conquest. Yet two corners of Gaul, the one fertile and rich, the other barren, Amorica and the Basque lands, never accept Latin.

Africa, though thoroughly colonized from Italy and penetrated with Italian blood as Gaul never was, retains the Punic speech century after century, to the very ends of Roman rule--seven hundred years after the fall of Carthage: four hundred after the end of the Roman Republic!

Spain, conquered and occupied by the Mohammedan, and settled in very great numbers by a highly civilized Oriental race, talks today a Latin only just touched by Arabic influence. Lombardy, Gallic in blood and with a strong infusion of repeated Germanic invasions (very much larger than ever Britain had!) has lost all trace of Gallic accent, even in language, save in one or two Alpine valleys, and of German speech retains nothing but a few rare and doubtful words. The plain of Hungary and the Carpathian Mountains are a tesselated pavement of languages quite dissimilar, Mongolian, Teutonic, Slav. The Balkan States have, _not_ upon their westward or European side, but at their extreme opposite limit, a population which continues the memory of the Empire in its speech; and the vocabulary of the Rumanians is _not the Greek of Byzantium_, which civilized them, but the Latin of Rome!

The most implacable of Mohammedans now under French rule in Algiers speak, and have spoken for centuries, not Arabic in any form, but Berber; and the same speech reappears beyond a wide belt of Arabic in the far desert to the south.

The Irish, a people in permanent contrast to the English, yet talk in the main the English tongue.

The French-Canadians, accepting political unity with Britain, retain their tongue and reject English.

Look where we will, we discover in regard to language something as incalculable as the human will, and as various as human instinct. The deliberate attempt to impose it has nearly always failed. Sometimes it survives as the result of a deliberate policy. Sometimes it is restored as a piece of national protest--Bohemia is an example. Sometimes it "catches on" naturally and runs for hundreds of miles covering the most varied peoples and even the most varied civilizations with a common veil.

Now the Roman towns were not destroyed, the original population was certainly not destroyed even in the few original settlements of Saxon and Angles in the sea and river sh.o.r.es of the East. Such civilization as the little courts of the Pirate chieftains maintained was degraded Roman or it was nothing. But the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" _language_--the group of half-German [Footnote: I say "_half_-German" lest the reader should think, by the use of the word "German" or "Teutonic" that the various dialects of this sort (including those of the North Sea Pirates) were something original, uninfluenced by Rome. It must always be remembered that with their original words and roots was mixed an equal ma.s.s of superior words learned from the civilized men of the South in the course of the many centuries during which Germans had served the Romans as slaves and in arms and had met their merchants.] dialects which may have taken root before the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the East of Britain, and which at any rate were well rooted there a hundred years after--stood ready for one of two fates. Either it would die out and be replaced by dialects half Celtic, half Latin vocabulary, or it would spread westward. That the Teutonic dialects of the eastern kinglets should spread westward might have seemed impossible. The unlettered barbarian does not teach the lettered civilized man; the pagan does not mold the Christian. It is the other way about. Yet in point of fact that happened. Why?

Before we answer that question let us consider another point. Side by side with the entry of civilization through the Roman missionary priests in Kent, there was going on a missionary effort in the North of the Island of Britain, which effort was Irish. It had various Celtic dialects for its common daily medium, though it was, of course, Roman in ritual at the altar. The Celtic missionaries, had they alone been in the field, would have made us all Celtic speaking today. But it was the direct mission from Rome that won, and this for the reason that it had behind it the full tide of Europe. Letters, order, law, building, schools, re-entered England through Kent--not through Northumberland where the Irish were preaching.

Even so the spread westward of a letterless and starved set of dialects from the little courts of the eastern coasts (from Canterbury and Bamborough and so forth) would have been impossible but for a tremendous accident.

St. Augustine, after his landing, proposed to the native British bishops that they should help in the conversion of the little pagan kinglets and their courts on the eastern coast. They would not. They had been cut off from Europe for so long that they had become warped. They refused communion. The peaceful Roman Mission coming just at the moment when the Empire had recovered Italy and was fully restoring itself, was thrown back on the Eastern courts. It used them. It backed _their_ tongue, _their_ arms, _their_ tradition. The terms of Roman things were carefully translated by the priests into the Teutonic dialects of these courts; the advance of civilization under the missionaries, recapturing more and more of the province of Britain, proceeded westward from the courts of the Eastern kinglets. The schools, the official world--all--was now turned by the weight of the Church against a survival of the Celtic tongues and in favor of the Eastern Teutonic ones.

Once civilization had come back by way of the South and East, princ.i.p.ally through the natural gate of Kent and through the Straits of Dover which had been blocked so long, this tendency of the Eastern dialects to spread as the language of an organized clerical officialdom and of its courts of law, was immediately strengthened. It soon and rapidly swamped all but the western hills. But of colonization, of the advance of a race, there was none. What advanced was the Roman organization once more and, with it, the dialects of the courts it favored.

What we know, then, of Britain when it was re-civilized we know through Latin terms or through the half-German dialects which ultimately and much later merge into what we call Anglo-Saxon. An historic King of Suss.e.x bears a Celtic name, but we read of him in the Latin, then in the Teutonic tongues, and his realm, however feeble the proportion of over-sea blood in it, bears an over-sea label for its court--"the South Saxon."

The mythical founder of Wess.e.x bears a Celtic name, Cerdic: but we read of him if not in Latin then in Anglo-Saxon. Not a _cantref_ but a _hundred_ is the term of social organization in England when it is re-civilized; not an _eglywys_ but a _church_ [Footnote: This word "church" is a good example of what we mean by Teutonic dialect. It is straight from the Mediterranean.

The native German word for a temple--if they had got so far as to have temples (for we know nothing of their religion)--is lost.] is the name of the building in which the new civilization hears Ma.s.s. The ruler, whatever his blood or the blood of his subjects, is a _Cynning_, not a _Reg_ or a _Prins_. His house and court are a _hall_ [Footnote: And "hall" is again a Roman word adopted by the Germans.] not a _plas_. We get our whole picture of renovated Britain (after the Church is restored) colored by this half-German speech. But the Britain we see thus colored is not barbaric. It is a Christian Britain of mixed origin, of ancient munic.i.p.alities cut off for a time by the Pirate occupation of the South and East, but now reunited with the one civilization whose root is in Rome.

This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel today that I must emphasize and confirm it.

Western Europe in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries was largely indifferent to our modern ideas of race. Of nationality it knew nothing.

It was concerned with the maintenance of the Catholic Church especially against the outer Pagan. This filled the mind. This drove all the mastering energies of the time. The Church, that is, all the acts of life, but especially record and common culture, came back into a Britain which had been cut off. It reopened the gate. It was refused aid by the Christian whom it relieved. It decided for the courts of the South and East, taught them organization, and carried their dialects with it through the Island which it gradually recovered for civilization.

We are now in a position to sum up our conclusions upon the matter:

Britain, connected with the rest of civilization by a narrow and precarious neck of sea-travel over the Straits of Dover, had, in the last centuries of Roman rule, often furnished great armies to usurpers or Imperial claimants, sometimes leaving the Island almost bare of regular troops. But with each return of peace these armies also had returned and the rule of the central Roman government over Britain had been fairly continuous until the beginning of the fifth century. At that moment--in 410 A.D.--the bulk of the trained soldiers again left upon a foreign adventure. But the central rule of Rome was then breaking down: these regulars never returned--though many auxiliary troops may have remained.

At this moment, when every province of the West was subject to disturbance and to the over-running of barbarian bands, small but destructive, Britain particularly suffered. Scotch, Irish and German barbarians looted her on all sides.

These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as auxiliaries in the Roman fas.h.i.+on, may already have been settled in places upon the eastern coast, their various half-German dialects may have already been common upon those coasts; but at any rate, after the breakdown of the Roman order, detached communities under little local chiefs arose. The towns were not destroyed.

Neither the slaves, nor, for that matter, the greater part of the free population fell. But wealth declined rapidly in the chaos as it did throughout Western Europe. And side by side with this ruin came the replacing of the Roman official language by a welter of Celtic and of half-German dialects in a ma.s.s of little courts. The new official Roman religion--certainly at the moment of the breakdown the religion of a small minority--almost or wholly disappeared in the Eastern pirate settlements.

The Roman language similarly disappeared in the many small princ.i.p.alities of the western part of the island; they reverted to their original Celtic dialects. There was no boundary between the hotchpotch of little German-speaking territories on the East and the little Celtic territories on the West. There was no more than a vague common feeling of West against East or East against West; all fought indiscriminately among themselves.

After a time which could be covered by two long lives, during which decline had been very rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the East throughout the Island, the full influence of civilization returned, with the landing in 597 of St. Augustine and his missionaries sent by the Pope.

_But the little Pirate courts of the East happened to have settled on coasts which occupied the gateway into the Island_; it was thus through them that civilization had been cut off, and it was through them that civilization came back. On this account:

(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce under the united discipline of the Church.

(2) The united British civilization so forming was able to advance gradually _westward_ across the island.

(3) Though the inst.i.tutions of Europe were much the same wherever Roman civilization had existed and had declined, though the councils of magnates surrounding the King, the a.s.semblies of armed men, the division of land and people into "hundreds" and the rest of it were common to Europe, _these things were given, over a wider and wider area of Britain, Eastern, half-German names because it was through the courts of the Eastern kinglets that civilization had returned_. The kinglets of the East, as civilization grew, were continually fed from the Continent, strengthened with ideas, inst.i.tutions, arts, and the discipline of the Church. Thus did they politically become more and more powerful, until the whole island, except the Cornish peninsula, Wales and the Northwestern mountains, was more or less administered by the courts which had their roots in the eastern coasts and rivers, and which spoke dialects cognate to those beyond the North Sea, while the West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed in political power and saw its Celtic dialects shrink in area.

By the time that this old Roman province of Britain re-arises as an ordered Christian land in the eighth century, its records are kept not only in Latin but in the Court "Anglo-Saxon" dialects: by far the most important being that of Winchester. Many place names, and the general speech of its inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a superficial but a very vivid change, is the chief outward change in the slow transformation that has been going on in Britain for three hundred years (450-500 to 750-800).

Britain is reconquered for civilization and that easily; it is again an established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound Europe together even more firmly than the old central government of Rome had bound it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom England was to remain for eight hundred years.