The two lost centuries of Britain

Preface

This little book is the outgrowth of an earnest endeavor to see clearly in my own mind, and for my own purposes, a part of the life of sixth century Britain. Almost at the beginning, I found that this implied much more, every decade hanging to the next like the links of a chain. Authority suggested authority ; one problem tempted the inquirer to another. My mass of notes grew bulky, even portentous. The natural outlet was by a careful consecutive statement, necessarily for the most part in narrative form and covering all that was really germane to the purpose in hand.

This proved an arduous undertaking, though not without a charm. Working in such materials, one could not but find it so. And now that it is ended, I am encouraged to think that it may serve the turn of others besides myself; and even entertain those who have no special object in view besides enjoyment. At the worst, one may look for sympathetic readers among the multitude who have delved in the same mine ; alas ! with the too frequent result of mutual contradiction. I, too, have contradicted a little, as in duty bound ; but I beg not to be regarded as doing so out of incurable

4 PREFACE.

perversity. One would wish to stand well with his most reliable audience.

There are those who will not concede that I am writing history, because I admit and present the probable, which is not provable in any strict sense. This raises the question of what history means. If it be a setting forth of the past as the past verily was, then the aid of inference and analogy cannot be excluded. A string of barren facts, with nothing to correlate, illustrate, or explain them, would be nearly as misleading as the wildest fiction. By the aid of a reasonable and regulated imagination, we may go right ; without it, we are certain to go wrong. A grinning skeleton is a very demonstrable residuum ; -but what idea does it convey of the fair young girl whose beauty was built up thereon ? The foundation of every work like this must necessarily be the same. I have accepted Gildas on the authority of Dr. Guest and Mr. Green, making conscientiously the most of him. There really is more than would be supposed, when his hints are examined thoughtfully and in detail. JSFennius, explained by Mr. Skene, is of even more capital importance. Without access to the manuscripts, I have necessarily been guided in the main by the printed editions of Dr. Gunn, and others, as I find them. For the Chronicles, I have generally preferred Ethel ward, although it matters little. The early Welsh poetry of Llywarch,

PREFACE. 5

Aneurin, Taliessin, Merddin, and lesser bards I have used freely and found particularly fruitful. A great mass of publications like the Journal of the Archseological Society, the Archceological Journal, the Archseologia Cambrensis, the Cambro- Britain, and the " Proceedings of the Archaeological Institute" have been studied volume by volume and reduced to more manageable shape. In " Geoffrey of Monmouth" and in " Henry of Huntington," fancy and real tradition are interwoven, the difference being chiefly of degree. Yet we cannot afford to discard them ; nor have I done so.

Among modern writings, I have profited most by Mr. Skene's " The Four Ancient Books of Wales" and " Celtic Scotland ;" Professor Pearson's " History of the Early and Middle Ages of England ;" Professor Rhys's " Celtic Britain ;" Dr. Guest's " Origines Celtica" and scattered papers ; Mr. Whittaker's " History of Manchester ;" Mr. Stephens's " Literature of the Cymry ;" Dr. Freeman's various histories and addresses; Mr. Wright's " The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon ;" Mr. Coode's " The Romans in Britain ;" and Mr. Green's " The Making of England."

One may add to these a long list of works consulted or studied separately or comparatively, partly or wholly, once only or repeatedly, as their relative importance to the end in view would seem to dictate : " The Mabinogion" of Lady Guest; Professor Boyd Dawkins's

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Q PREFACE.

" Caye-Hunting ;" Mr. Stuart- Glennie's "Arthurian "Localities" and "Merlin;" Nash's " Taliessin j" Williams's "Barddas" and "the lola MSS. ;" Loftie's " History of London ;" Poste's " Britannia Antiqua ;" Morant's "History of Essex;" Earle's "Two Old English Chronicles;" Allen's "History of London;" Mrs. Boger's " Myths, Scenes, and Worthies of Somerset ;" " The Encyclopaedia Britannica ;" La Villemarque's " Chants de la Bretagne ;" Sharon Turner's " History of the Saxons ;" Akerman's " Remains of Pagan Saxondom ;" Grant Allen's " Anglo-Saxon Britain ;" " Roman Britain," of the same series ; Thorpe's " Codex Exoniensis ;" " Florence of Worcester ;" Dr. Guest's "History of English Metres;" Dr. Child's first six volumes of "English Ballads;" Taylor's "Ballads and Songs of Brittany;" certain notable papers of Symonds and W. Basil Jones; Malory's " History of King Arthur ;" Gibbon ; Mommsen ; Sammes's "Antiquities of Britain;" Branston and Le Roy's " History of Winchester ;" Akerman's " Numismatic Manual," with others like it, and the current reviews and magazines, both archaeological and popular, which have contained many articles bearing on various branches of my subject.

This is by no means an exhaustive enumeration, unless in the sense of exhausting the reader on the threshold. For fear of such result I will say no more.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — The Preparation won Them 9

II. — Prom the First Coming of the Saxon to the

CHAPTER I. THE PEEPAEATIOJSr FOR THEM

Almost every people has had its beginning in prehistoric chaos ; but one only, in Europe at least, ever sank back for a season out of the daylight into the abyss. There is no parallel to the long submergence of Britain following the withdrawal of Eome : a disordered darkness brooding over the rise of new island powers and the flickering away of old broken splendor ! For long another " world " in the western sea dimly reported ; then through four centuries a land of open travel and continued record, an integral member of the superb Roman organism ; and then again suddenly relegated to the myths and the shades, a haunt of spectral ferrymen and their dead passengers, a doubtful and ghostly hoverer on the frontier of knowledge ! Yet to this third era belonged Hengist and Vortigern ; the saint of the Hallelujah field, the beguiling Rowena ;

Vortimer, redoubtable in life and death; Ambrose, Prince of the Sanctuary ; Geraint, the hero of Enid and of Llongborth ; Arthur triumphing on Mount Baden ; Kyndylan of the Powys purple, defending in vain the shining city Uricon, — "the white town, the wasted town, the town of flame !" No wonder that the fancy of mankind, from Mark the Anchorite to Alfred Tennyson, has lingered in that dreamland of enchantment !

Even the gravest researchers have yielded to the spell and gone knight-erranting as on no other field. To follow their wild excursions, to witness their shock and mutual overthrow, is at first only to multiply bewilderment. Hardly one fact is accorded standingroom by all ; hardly one assertion has escaped emphatic denial. We are not to know in peace who came to Britain ; or when or why they came ; whom they found there ; or what they did with these predecessors. We have the names of leaders, but every one is under indictment of being nobody at all, or somebody else. We have list after list of battles ; but each took place in several counties, or at various periods, or in the land of fable only. We have a body of surviving poetry, more than admirable in fragments and passages ; but does this belong partly to a hundred years before, or wholly to three hundred years later ? It is indeed admitted on all hands that the Roman legions went away, for you positively cannot find any of them in England

THE TWO LOST CENTURIES OF BRITAIN. H

now, — but the time of their departure is shifted about from end to eud of a generation. We have even been warned that Britain had a continental namesake or double ganger to which — or to Bruttium — the divorcing letter of Honorius may have been directed.

Yet let us be sane and easy, for the truth will come out of clamor. We have good warrant of experience to expect that it will take the lines of old authentic tradition enlarged and corrected. It is not for nothing that mankind has its memory. Gibbon, believing in Arthur for Nennius's sake, is near the final outcome. But we desire to know much more than Gibbon, or any one in his day, could tell.

The witchery of words is in wait at the heart of the confusion, for names breed pictures, and pictures are not as adaptable as names, however the facts may vary. Mr. Coode's Lloegrian, for example, is a Teuton Romanized in feeling, habit and (partly) in blood ; Mr. Pearson's Lloegrian is a Celt imperfectly tutored by E.ome ; Dr. Guest's Lloegrian is an out-and-out Anglo- Saxon, hating Rome and Celt with equal fervor ; and the Lloegrian of other writers is a southern Celt with hardly a tatter of Rome about him, who would not join the muster and revel of Cattraeth. Now every one of these conceptions is true for some period or some area : the Lloegrian being simply, first or last, a dweller in the eastward part of Britain.

Again, the Saxon conquest is, in Mr. Coode's conception, very little more than the comfortable absorption and education of barbarians by a resident mass of civilized people ; to Dr. Guest and Dr. Freeman it is a grim and thorough slaughter for more than a hundred years ; to Mr. Green it is a slow beating back, with few of the vanquished left within the victor's lines until the Severn Valley was gained ; to Archdeacon Jones it is the winning of the low grounds only, the Celt remaining in the uplands even to-day ; to Mr. Wright it is in the west, a comparatively harmless overrunning of a region already devastated by the Celts of Brittany; while Mr. Pearson makes it partly a matter of bargain or compromise, partly a championship of the cities against the unruly country people. In so long a contest there must have been instances of almost everything. An adequate understanding of it would include the above and much more.

In deciphering this past we must use all men's speculations for what they are worth. We must bring to bear whatever science offers us of method and of gleanings elsewhere. We must trace the antecedents of these people and the conditions surrounding them. We must compare the known doings of other men in other lands and times, where the cases are most nearly parallel. We must consult the writings of men then living, as far as they go ; the greater mass of oral tradition first put iuto writing at a later time or not yet written down at all ; the great book of the soil, opening very slowly, year by year, to show precisely what man was and man made use of then. It will be long indeed before any one will come equipped for such a life-work. Meanwhile, we may lay down outlines and proffer hints which ought to have some value.

The time has gone by when one might hold, with Dr. Guest, that the first man in Britain was a Celt — some few thousand years ago. There were Esquimaux in the laud, no doubt, and savager, perhaps even half human, inhabitants before them. All such may have come and gone, following the ice northward or the sun southward and leaving an empty realm behind. The same thing has happened on a smaller scale in other island worlds. There are some which have been settled within sure human knowledge, the incomers finding no one to contest their sway. There are others which wait even yet for the abiding presence of man.

But Britain, even after it was geologically cut loose from the mainland, lay too near for this to be likely. Tribe would mix with tribe across the channel ; shoresmen, as soon as they could float, would from time to time be driven over, or tempted, from the hollow fenland between the Rhine and the Elbe. There is also a shadowy and uncertain kind of a posteriori evidence. Anthropometric physiologists believe that they have found Mongolian and other strange elements in the outlines and measures of some rural Englishmen. To be sure, these may be no more than inherited Roman importations from the far east and far south of that empire ; or even the contribution of Saxon sea-kings, who numbered, as Gibbon thought, a few adventurous Huns among their crews. Or the Ivernian conquerors, to borrow the good word of Professor E-hys, may have brought these qualities, latent by inheritance, in their veins. But, on the whole, it is perhaps not unlikely that some of these phenomena are the earlier human wave-marks imperfectly obliterated.

From this author we may cite an inference concerning Jack the Giant-Killer and other early tales, and push it a little farther than he has cared to go. For the dwarfs and the gnomes had already been similarly explained, and the Irish peasant knows very well that " the good people" are those who dwelt in Ireland before the Irish came. Popular fancy is less creative than decorative ; and when it gives us heterogeneity as its report of the people of the past, we may accept heterogeneity as probably true. If they were all Ivernians together, — the great man-eaters, the squat waylayers, the tricksy, light-footed little people of the fells, — they can hardly, at any rate, have been Ivernians of similar parentage on both sides. Where they differ we may find the dim record of yet earlier conquests by the mighty of limb, or the shrewd and malignantly watchful, over the simple, the feeble, and the fleeing. Women have ever been preserved as a spoil in such inroads, and nature sees to it that every seemingly lost race shall live on in its conqueror's offspring. When one thinks of the tangle of human blood woven everywhere through many centuries, it is not to wonder that certain anthropologists (for example. Major Powell) deny that mankind are classifiable in races, or definitely in any way except by language and custom. Almost any extreme is better than to conceive of the Basque or Celt or Saxon as always fair-haired or always dark-haired, with equal limitation as to stature, temperament, and usage; and to carry the same unrelenting method through every other page of history.

Still we may be warranted in supposing that most Iverniaus, when the Celts overtook them in Britain, were a darker and shorter race ; that their heads were more often long than round ; and their temperament (following an ingenious suggestion of Professor Rhys) imaginative and mirthful beyond that of their invaders. But in looking back through the mist, we hardly see them at all before they vanish from or in the new dominant race. Their legacy is a name here and there clinging to island or river, a few doubtful monuments, of which Stonehenge may be an example, a few relics from the caverns or from beneath the sod, and how much of English blood and English life in both hemispheres, we can never know.

Their successors are nearer to us every way and less shadowy, but we stumble along even here. In the same breath we are told that the Celt was a tall, round-headed blonde, and that the test of Celtic blood in a nominally Teutonic people is the frequency of the long skull, the short stature, the dark hair and face. Yet each statement is true in its way, the former of the typical Celt, the Celt as he began ; the latter of the Celt as his own conquests had made him.

For, whether his starting-point were the Central Asian plateau or the shores of the Baltic, he reached Britain from afar, fighting and marrying vi et armis through many intervening lands. Just before him fragments of the Ivernians and other early folk were driven ; close behind him the Teutons came crowding. Now and again they overtook and intermingled, or even thrust on ahead. So in an overlapping and confused entanglement of waves, each with its own especial compromise of aspect, language, and blood, one great rush of invasion came pouring across from the south, another (if traditions tell us truly) from the east and northeast over the German Ocean, the broad war-path of the Saxon and Viking in later days. And as Harold had to fight in the same year the Northman and the Norman, so the islander before all history may have had to make head at once against this swarming of taller, fairer folk upon the two most open borders of his realm. In that contest he could not win, nor was any escape open save to Ireland ; and even there they followed him mightily. There was nothing for it but to die or to mingle ; and as the Ivernian had darkened down to the folk whom he had found and conquered, the Celt, with like exceptions and modifications, began darkening down to him. These foremost Celts may have been Gaels, as some have thought ; or both Gaels and Cymry ; or people of an older tongue, which became differentiated into these languages on the island itself. The settlement must at any rate have begun in remote antiquity, for as early as the time of Strabo there was a fairly advanced population along the coast, with differences from the inland dwellers implying more than one later migration. Such, no doubt, recurred again and again, until the heavy hand of Rome was laid on the island, forbidding all change except what came with her will.

But she let in the light also ; and by this and later knowledge we are able to map out the land after a fashion. Between the Thames and the Channel the most notable Caint or open upland of Britain was held by a fairly civilized race of husbandmen ; probably Celts. Opposite the Armorican peninsula, the second-best crossing of the Channel, a Belgic invasion 6 2* was filling Hampshire with Gauls, whom some have styled Germanic, 'but who were probably more so in sentiment and imitation than in blood. The Cateiuchlani of Hertfordshire, and perhaps also the Iceni of Norfolk, Boadicea's redoubtable tribe, have had the same repute in some quarters, it may be on account of recent half-Teuton reinforcements from beyond the sea. The eastern folk were at any rate a people of good skill in peace and war, of some wealth, some traffic, and an abundant coinage. The Coritani north of them had won in Cymric legend the name of magicians ; even a little knowledge and a foreign aspect being a marvel in primitive eyes. A race of Scandinavian type, tall, brawny, red-haired " Caledonian" lovers of freedom, held the lowlands of Scotland, testing severely the ablest general and the best courage of Rome. But the dark, sturdy Silures, no doubt largely Ivernian as Tacitus thought them, were even more indomitable beyond the lower Severn. Other folk of this latter favor, long afterwards known in terror as Pechts or Picts, predominated throughout the hill country of the far north. Yet others, in the main like them, roamed the north Welsh mountains, with reflex Irish settlements already fringing their coast ; or held the famous mining country of Damnonia, where some amelioration of manners (and of race) might be laid to the account of trading voyagers from the Orient. The midland folk were no doubt transitional, but except the childish imitations of the Yorkshire Brigantes, the farthest kingdom which undertook the work of minting coin, we have little to mark the fading out of the southeastward culture.

There in the fertile open plateaux, easy of foreign access, easier for tillage and travel, power, as well as commerce and agriculture, had its home. As with greater communities, the centre shifted, now this petty realm, now that, becoming law-giver in its turn, until dominion rested, as if in prophecy, near the site of London. Before his long eclipse, the Celt shone out at his very best in the noble little empire of Cymbelline, — Cunebelline the golden, the friend of Augustus, the darling of the gods. You may see him yet in fair relief on his own beautiful gold-pieces, borne to victory by the goddess who took the form of a brute for his sake.

Yet, wide as was the interval between the huge Caledonian of the flaming hair and the dwarfish, darkbrowed Silure, between the illustrious Cunebelline and the squat savage of the northern waste, they were all Celts in their language at any rate, so far as we know. There have been fancies to the contrary, such as that of Mr. Coode, who supposes the Anglo-Saxon to have found his language awaiting him in Britain ; but these remain fancies only. The greatest divergence of speech was probably between the Gael and the Cymro; each of these two main stems, according to Mr. Skene, being again divided into two groups of dialects, corresponding to the more familiar High German and Low German -clusters. The Gael was strongest in the far north and along tlie western coast ; but almost everywhere else yielded to his rival. The differences, already noted, of aspect and manners did not correspond with any accuracy to these differences of tongue. All considered, our variegated friend, the Ancient Briton, was much more unlike himself and out of unanimity than popular fancy pictures him.

Kome fixed those uneasy populations in their seats ; added to their volume and variety ; drew them partly from the heights into the valleys ; gathered the quieter elements into cities ; improved communication, opening many roads where few had been ; and fostered in all things, where she did not compel, conformity to her own higher or more luxurious standard. So zealously was the work done, that long after her departure there yet remained the glimmer of the imperial purple, the shadow of legionary discipline, the curse of Roman debauch. These were everywhere, unless in the woods and on the wilder heaths and hills.

The Roman occupancy falls readily into three periods, — the first brutality of conquest; the long peaceful domination, when there was neither war or rumor of war, unless in a small way with predatorymountain tribes on the far border; and the era of decay, when incursions became frequent and disastrous, usurpers abounded, wrangling, and year by year there grew a dread upon all of being cut off alive from the living mass of men. We remember the first period by the extravagance of cruelty which it employed and provoked, — the wrongs of Boadicea and her kindred, the massacre of London. These have stirred the blood of all succeeding generations, and will stir it so long as human sympathy endures ; but in the fact that there were seventy thousand immigrants to be overwhelmed by that blind retribution, besides many survivors, we may more profitably study the great change already working on British soil.

But this was the merest casual eddy of the incoming flood. The legions built their forts and planted their garrisons, and settlements grew up about them, pushing continually farther to the west and north, until in each direction a line of half-military cities — Exeter, Caerleon, Wroxeter, Chester, or Carlisle and Durham — represented very nearly the final limit of civilization.

In the open space behind them, colonies of veterans were planted ; merchants and mariners of many countries gathered along the landing-places and narrow streets of the growing river towns ; and moneyed men from the Mediterranean, the Rhine, or tlie Loire took up their abode on the lands newly bought or granted, building low colonnaded dwellings of open interior and mighty expansion, the like of which have never been seen in England since their day.

Yet the South European has not given up this architectural ideal even in the New World. Old Cuban or Mexican memories of its less imposing embodiments will be recalled by many a traveller. No •wonder that it should have been carried unimpaired so far as the Scotch lowlands or the valleys of the Exe and the Wye.

Its hollow heart is sometimes a paved court-yard, sometimes a flower-garden. About this the rooms are built casemate-fashion, every one opening inwardly upon it and some also opening outwardly, with ironbarred windows which commonly have no glass in them. One story is the usual height at all points, except at the rear, where a second may be added. The front is often in stucco, painted gaudily.

Under the magic of Rome, the inner walls broke into marble columns or threw out long pillared porticoes for the frescoed banquet-hall or the tessellated bathing-apartments, where one would move amid appliances now forgotten and over rare designs. Fountains, shrines, and statuary, all were multiplied.

In the later days Eastern decoration wound profuselyover capital and cornice. Walls and flooring bloomed out in the beauty of early myth and childlike fancy. Bathing or dreaming or dining, the Roman had ever around him the divinely familiar figures, — Aphrodite the foam-born ; Bacchus on his panther steed ; Orpheus with his dumb audience enthralled by melody ; Narcissus by the fountain ; the frolics of the nymphs and dryads ; the loves of Cupid and Psyche, of Jove and Leda, — perennial things which have become commonplaces without losing their delightfulness.

In the transfer to Britain, some few changes became necessary. Of course the heating arrangements grew more numerous and ample, though following old models generally. The needs of new settlers compelled often a gradual or partial approach to what was desired. For material they commonly used what was near at hand, with varying results. Occasionally the founder of a house began with but a single row of rooms, to which later generations added wings and other outgrowths when successively needed. Often, especially in cities, there was tearing down and rebuilding again and again on or over the same foundations. The suburban villa answered fairly to what we know by that name ; but farther away the dwelling took on a more complex and self-sufficing character. It must be the centre of agricultural operations on a large scale ;

a storehouse ample enough to defy famine, large enough to be garrisoned against any predatory woodland enemy. It must even be something of a manufactory, something of a provincial capital. These requirements varied in importance with the shifting of circumstances and of years. In the underground traces brought continually to light, we find their succession hinted, and the expedients whereby such changes were met. Even the religious conversion under Constantine, though it cannot have been at all deep or thorough, has left some slight rural vestiges, if we understand them rightly, in the shrine of the nymph degraded to lucrative uses, her statue buried in debris where it lay overthrown. But whatever the details of their history, the greatest of these Roman-British homes, when at their best, were undoubtedly vast and imposing structures; little less than towns for area and population, or than palaces for the splendor of their appointments.

The cities were in some instances, perhaps generally, provided with the central forum of their Italian prototype, the narrow streets in part converging thereon, the public baths, the wide and lofty basilica. In this last were the merchants' exchange, the committeerooms, the administrative offices, the great court-room, or hall of audience, with its double array of Corinthian pillars above and below the gallery. Verulam, whither the wealth of London may have largely resorted, was the possessor of a theatre and amphitheatre worthy of the parent land. The temple of Hercules at Calleva, the temple of the sun at Aquse Solis, were edifices to make the burghers who dwelt about them dilate with pride.

Yet at a bird's-eye view the British cities must have differed greatly, for a reason already given. Thus, in London architecture brick predominated, while the houses of some other towns were as often of wood only, and Uriconium shone out of the western woodland in a garment of white stone and a head-dress glittering with mica.

For defence they were equipped very unequally. London grew up around a fortress, and was walled again on a much more extensive plan when danger drew near in the decline of Roman power. Calleva (Silchester) and Uriconium (Wroxeter) were probably not enclosed until a still later time. The circumvallation of Deva (Chester), Camulodunum (Colchester), and Anderida (Pevensey) may have been ample from first to last. • Verulam remained quite open until her final overthrow.

But the Roman civilization of Britain was partial in area, thin and weak in personal influence, inferior | nearly everywhere to the best of Gaul, and attended / always by its shadow. Not only did all the mountain land remain wilfully or hatefully outside of it, but there is no reason to suppose that it made more than the barest lodgment in the rugged forests of the watersheds, whether midland or well down towards the eastern and southern coasts. It followed the valleys upward, it spread fan-like over the open uplands, it busied itself about the marshes and estuaries near the sea, it fringed the great wall and the watchful skirts of the southwestern garrisons, it left isles of uncertain light along the Roman and pre-Roman highways. But where the wild ox and the wild boar harbored, the refractory Briton who had no Latin nor aptitude for Latinization well might harbor too. Others of his kindred, less exacting or defiant, became the servile dependants of the conqueror, as they did again long afterwards when the Saxons came. Across the Wallbrook, within a stone's throw of the great fortress and the wealthy merchants' houses, lay the unhappy London of the Celt. Beside the splendor of Uriconium was ever a native Wrekin city tattered and wan.