Grant Allen - Early Britain

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[Illustration: BRITAIN IN A.D. 500]

EARLY BRITAIN.

ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

BY

GRANT ALLEN, B.A.

PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE OF GENERAL LITERATURE AND
EDUCATION APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

LONDON:
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE,
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, S.W.;
43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.; 48, PICCADILLY, W.;
AND 135, NORTH STREET, BRIGHTON.

NEW YORK: E. & J.B. YOUNG & CO.

PREFACE.

This little book is an attempt to give a brief sketch of Britain under
the early English conquerors, rather from the social than from the
political point of view. For that purpose not much has been said about
the doings of kings and statesmen; but attention has been mainly
directed towards the less obvious evidence afforded us by existing
monuments as to the life and mode of thought of the people themselves.
The principal object throughout has been to estimate the importance of
those elements in modern British life which are chiefly due to purely
English or Low-Dutch influences.

The original authorities most largely consulted have been, first and
above all, the "English Chronicle," and to an almost equal extent,
Baeda's "Ecclesiastical History." These have been supplemented, where
necessary, by Florence of Worcester and the other Latin writers of later
date. I have not thought it needful, however, to repeat any of the
gossiping stories from William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and
their compeers, which make up the bulk of our early history as told in
most modern books. Still less have I paid any attention to the romances
of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Gildas, Nennius, and the other Welsh tracts
have been sparingly employed, and always with a reference by name. Asser
has been used with caution, where his information seems to be really
contemporary. I have also derived some occasional hints from the old
British bards, from _Beowulf_, from the laws, and from the charters in
the "Codex Diplomaticus." These written documents have been helped out
by some personal study of the actual early English relics preserved in
various museums, and by the indirect evidence of local nomenclature.

Among modern books, I owe my acknowledgments in the first and highest
degree to Dr. E.A. Freeman, from whose great and just authority,
however, I have occasionally ventured to differ in some minor matters.
Next, my acknowledgments are due to Canon Stubbs, to Mr. Kemble, and to
Mr. J.R. Green. Dr. Guest's valuable papers in the Transactions of the
Archaeological Institute have supplied many useful suggestions. To
Lappenberg and Sir Francis Palgrave I am also indebted for various
details. Professor Rolleston's contributions to "Archaeologia," as well
as his Appendix to Canon Greenwell's "British Barrows," have been
consulted for anthropological and antiquarian points; on which also
Professor Huxley and Mr. Akerman have published useful papers. Professor
Boyd Dawkins's work on "Early Man in Britain," as well as the writings
of Worsaae and Steenstrup have helped in elucidating the condition of
the English at the date of the Conquest. Nor must I forget the aid
derived from Mr. Isaac Taylor's "Words and Places," from Professor
Henry Morley's "English Literature," and from Messrs. Haddan and Stubbs'
"Councils." To Mr. Gomme, Mr. E.B. Tylor, Mr. Sweet, Mr. James Collier,
Dr. H. Leo, and perhaps others, I am under various obligations; and if
any acknowledgments have been overlooked, I trust the injured person
will forgive me when I have had already to quote so many authorities for
so small a book. The popular character of the work renders it
undesirable to load the pages with footnotes of reference; and scholars
will generally see for themselves the source of the information given in
the text.

Personally, my thanks are due to my friend, Mr. York Powell, for much
valuable aid and assistance, and to the Rev. E. McClure, one of the
Society's secretaries, for his kind revision of the volume in proof, and
for several suggestions of which I have gladly availed myself.

As various early English names and phrases occur throughout the book, it
will be best, perhaps, to say a few words about their pronunciation
here, rather than to leave over that subject to the chapter on the
Anglo-Saxon language, near the close of the work. A few notes on this
matter are therefore appended below.

[Transcriber's note: For this Latin-1 version, macrons have
been marked as [=x], and breve accents as [)x]. See the
Unicode version for a proper rendering of these accents.]

The simple vowels, as a rule, have their continental pronunciation,
approximately thus: [=a] as in _father_, [)a] as in _ask_; [=e] as in
_there_, [)e] as in _men_; [=i] as in _marine_, [)i] as _fit_; [=o] as
in _note_, [)o] as in _not_; [=u] as in _brute_, [)u] as in _full_; [=y]
as in _gruen_ (German), [)y] as in _huebsch_ (German). The quantity of
the vowels is not marked in this work. _AE_ is not a diphthong, but a
simple vowel sound, the same as our own short _a_ in _man_, _that_, &c.
_Ea_ is pronounced like _ya_. _C_ is always hard, like _k_; and _g_ is
also always hard, as in _begin_: they must _never_ be pronounced like
_s_ or _j_. The other consonants have the same values as in modern
English. No vowel or consonant is ever mute. Hence we get the following
approximate pronunciations: AElfred and AEthelred, as if written Alfred
and Athelred; AEthelstan and Dunstan, as Athelstahn and Doonstahn;
Eadwine and Oswine, nearly as Yahd-weena and Ose-weena; Wulfsige and
Sigeberht, as Wolf-seeg-a and Seeg-a-bayrt; Ceolred and Cynewulf, as
Keole-red and Kuene-wolf. These approximations look a little absurd when
written down in the only modern phonetic equivalents; but that is the
fault of our own existing spelling, not of the early English names
themselves.

G.A.

ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH.

At a period earlier than the dawn of written history there lived
somewhere among the great table-lands and plains of Central Asia a race
known to us only by the uncertain name of Aryans. These Aryans were a
fair-skinned and well-built people, long past the stage of aboriginal
savagery, and possessed of a considerable degree of primitive culture.
Though mainly pastoral in habit, they were acquainted with tillage, and
they grew for themselves at least one kind of cereal grain. They spoke a
language whose existence and nature we infer from the remnants of it
which survive in the tongues of their descendants, and from these
remnants we are able to judge, in some measure, of their civilisation
and their modes of thought. The indications thus preserved for us show
the Aryans to have been a simple and fierce community of early warriors,
farmers, and shepherds, still in a partially nomad condition, living
under a patriarchal rule, originally ignorant of all metals save gold,
but possessing weapons and implements of stone,[1] and worshipping as
their chief god the open heaven. We must not regard them as an idyllic
and peaceable people: on the contrary, they were the fiercest and most
conquering tribe ever known. In mental power and in plasticity of
manners, however, they probably rose far superior to any race then
living, except only the Semitic nations of the Mediterranean coast.

[1] Professor Boyd Dawkins has shown that the Continental
Celts were still in their stone age when they invaded
Europe; whence we must conclude that the original Aryans
were unacquainted with the use of bronze.

From the common Central Asian home, colonies of warlike Aryans gradually
dispersed themselves, still in the pre-historic period, under pressure
of population or hostile invasion, over many districts of Europe and
Asia. Some of them moved southward, across the passes of Afghanistan,
and occupied the fertile plains of the Indus and the Ganges, where they
became the ancestors of the Brahmans and other modern high-caste
Hindoos. The language which they took with them to their new settlements
beyond the Himalayas was the Sanskrit, which still remains to this day
the nearest of all dialects that we now possess to the primitive Aryan
speech. From it are derived the chief modern tongues of northern India,
from the Vindhyas to the Hindu Kush. Other Aryan tribes settled in the
mountain districts west of Hindustan; and yet others found themselves a
home in the hills of Iran or Persia, where they still preserve an allied
dialect of the ancient mother tongue.

But the mass of the emigrants from the Central Asian fatherland moved
further westward in successive waves, and occupied, one after another,
the midland plains and mountainous peninsulas of Europe. First of all,
apparently, came the Celts, who spread slowly across the South of Russia
and Germany, and who are found at the dawn of authentic history
extending over the entire western coasts and islands of the continent,
from Spain to Scotland. Mingled in many places with the still earlier
non-Aryan aborigines--perhaps Iberians and Euskarians, a short and
swarthy race, armed only with weapons of polished stone, and represented
at the present day by the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Asturias--the
Celts held rule in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, up to the date of the
several Roman conquests. A second great wave of Aryan immigration, that
of the Hellenic and Italian races, broke over the shores of the _AEgean_
and the Adriatic, where their cognate languages have become familiar to
us in the two extreme and typical forms of the classical Greek and
Latin. A third wave was that of the Teutonic or German people, who
followed and drove out the Celts over a large part of central and
western Europe; while a fourth and final swarm was that of the Slavonic
tribes, which still inhabit only the extreme eastern portion of the
continent.

With the Slavonians we shall have nothing to do in this enquiry; and
with the Greek and Italian races we need only deal very incidentally.
But the Celts, whom the English invaders found in possession of all
Britain when they began their settlements in the island, form the
subject of another volume in this series, and will necessarily call for
some small portion of our attention here also; while it is to the
Germanic race that the English stock itself actually belongs, so that we
must examine somewhat more closely the course of Germanic immigration
through Europe, and the nature of the primitive Teutonic civilisation.

The Germanic family of peoples consisted of a race which early split up
into two great hordes or stocks, speaking dialects which differed
slightly from one another through the action of the various
circumstances to which they were each exposed. These two stocks are the
High German and the Low German (with which last may be included the
Gothic and the Scandinavian). Moving across Europe from east to west,
they slowly drove out the Celts from Germany and the central plains, and
took possession of the whole district between the Alps, the Rhine, and
the Baltic, which formed their limits at the period when they first came
into contact with the Roman power. The Goths, living in closest
proximity to the empire, fell upon it during the decline and decay of
Rome, settled in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and becoming absorbed in the
mass of the native population, disappear altogether from history as a
distinguishable nationality. But the High and Low Germans retain to the
present day their distinctive language and features; and the latter
branch, to which the English people belong, still lives for the most
part in the same lands which it has held ever since the date of the
early Germanic immigration.

The Low Germans, in the third century after Christ, occupied in the main
the belt of flat country between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine.
Between them and the old High German Swabians lay a race intermediate in
tongue and blood, the Franks. The Low Germans were divided, like most
other barbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes,
whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the few
authorities which remain to us. We must not expect to find among them
the definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather such a
vagueness as that which characterised the loose confederacies of North
American Indians or the various shifting peoples of South Africa. But
there are three of their tribes which stand fairly well marked off from
one another in early history, and which bore, at least, the chief share
in the colonisation of Britain. These three tribes are the Jutes, the
English, and the Saxons. Closely connected with them, but less strictly
bound in the same family tie, were the Frisians.

The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, lived in the marshy
forests and along the winding fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula
of Denmark, which still preserves their name in our own day. The English
dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad neck of the peninsula, which
we now call Sleswick. And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the
flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to that of the Rhine.
At the period when history lifts the curtain upon the future Germanic
colonists of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of the
low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North Sea, and closely
connected with other tribes on either side, such as the Frisians and the
Danes, who still speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian
languages.

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the relationship between
the first Teutonic settlers in Britain and their continental brethren.
Not only are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly connected
with the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in the
colonisation of the island at all; and more closely connected with the
Frisians, some of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical
hordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a later date in all
the northern counties: but they are also most closely connected of all
with those members of the colonising tribes who did not themselves bear
a share in the settlement, and whose descendants are still living in
Denmark and in various parts of Germany. The English proper, it is true,
seem to have deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body; so that,
according to Baeda, the Christian historian of Northumberland, in his
time this oldest England by the shores of the Baltic lay waste and
unpeopled, through the completeness of the exodus. But the Jutes appear
to have migrated in small numbers, while the larger part of the tribe
remained at home in their native marshland; and of the more numerous
Saxons, though a great swarm went out to conquer southern Britain, a
vast body was still left behind in Germany, where it continued
independent and pagan till the time of Karl the Great, long after the
Teutonic colonists of Britain had grown into peaceable and civilised
Christians. It is from the statements of later historians with regard to
these continental Saxons that our knowledge of the early English customs
and institutions, during the continental period of English history, must
be mainly inferred. We gather our picture of the English and Saxons who
first came to this country from the picture drawn for us of those among
their brethren whom they left behind in the primitive English home.

These three tribes, the Jutes, the English, and the Saxons, had not yet,
apparently, advanced far enough in the idea of national unity to possess
a separate general name, distinguishing them altogether from the other
tribes of the Germanic stock. Most probably they did not regard
themselves at this period as a single nation at all, or even as more
closely bound to one another than to the surrounding and kindred tribes.
They may have united at times for purposes of a special war; but their
union was merely analogous to that of two North American peoples, or two
modern European nations, pursuing a common policy for awhile. At a later
date, in Britain, the three tribes learned to call themselves
collectively by the name of that one among them which earliest rose to
supremacy--the English; and the whole southern half of the island came
to be known by their name as England. Even from the first it seems
probable that their language was spoken of as English only, and
comparatively little as Saxon. But since it would be inconvenient to use
the name of one dominant tribe alone, the English, as equivalent to
those of the three, and since it is desirable to have a common title for
all the Germanic colonists of Britain, whenever it is necessary to speak
of them together, we shall employ the late and, strictly speaking,
incorrect form of "Anglo-Saxons" for this purpose. Similarly, in order
to distinguish the earliest pure form of the English language from its
later modern form, now largely enriched and altered by the addition of
Romance or Latin words and the disuse of native ones, we shall always
speak of it, where distinction is necessary, as Anglo-Saxon. The term is
now too deeply rooted in our language to be again uprooted; and it has,
besides, the merit of supplying a want. At the same time, it should be
remembered that the expression Anglo-Saxon is purely artificial, and was
never used by the people themselves in describing their fellows or their
tongue. When they did not speak of themselves as Jutes, English, and
Saxons respectively, they spoke of themselves as English alone.

CHAPTER II.

THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC.

From the notices left us by Baeda in Britain, and by Nithard and others
on the continent, of the habits and manners which distinguished those
Saxons who remained in the old fatherland, we are able to form some idea
of the primitive condition of those other Saxons, English, and Jutes,
who afterwards colonized Britain, during the period while they still all
lived together in the heather-clad wastes and marshy lowlands of Denmark
and Northern Germany. The early heathen poem of _Beowulf_ also gives us
a glimpse of their ideas and their mode of thought. The known physical
characteristics of the race, the nature of the country which they
inhabited, the analogy of other Germanic tribes, and the recent
discoveries of pre-historic archaeology, all help us to piece out a
fairly consistent picture of their appearance, their manner of life, and
their rude political institutions.

We must begin by dismissing from our minds all those modern notions
which are almost inevitably implied by the use of language directly
derived from that of our heathen ancestors, but now mixed up in our
conceptions with the most advanced forms of European civilisation. We
must not allow such words as "king" and "English" to mislead us into a
species of filial blindness to the real nature of our Teutonic
forefathers. The little community of wild farmers and warriors who lived
among the dim woodlands of Sleswick, beside the swampy margin of the
North Sea, has grown into the nucleus of a vast empire, only very
partially Germanic in blood, and enriched by all the alien culture of
Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome. But as it still preserves the
identical tongue of its early barbarous days, we are naturally tempted
to read our modern acquired feelings into the simple but familiar terms
employed by our continental predecessors. What the early English called
a king we should now-a-days call a chief; what they called a meeting of
wise men we should now-a-days call a palaver. In fact, we must recollect
that we are dealing with a purely barbaric race--not savage, indeed, nor
without a certain rude culture of its own, the result of long centuries
of previous development; yet essentially military and predatory in its
habits, and akin in its material civilisation to many races which we now
regard as immeasurably our inferiors. If we wish for a modern equivalent
of the primitive Anglo-Saxon level of culture, we may perhaps best find
it in the Kurds of the Turkish and Persian frontier, or in the Mahrattas
of the wild mountain region of the western Deccan.

The early English in Sleswick and Friesland had partially reached the
agricultural stage of civilisation. They tilled little plots of ground
in the forest; but they depended more largely for subsistence upon their
cattle, and they were also hunters and trappers in the great belts of
woodland or marsh which everywhere surrounded their isolated villages.
They were acquainted with the use of bronze from the first period of
their settlement in Europe, and some of the battle-axes or shields which
they manufactured from this metal were beautifully chased with exquisite
decorative patterns, equalling in taste the ornamental designs still
employed by the Polynesian islanders. Such weapons, however, were
doubtless intended for the use of the chieftains only, and were probably
employed as insignia of rank alone. They are still discovered in the
barrows which cover the remains of the early chieftains; though it is
possible that they may really belong to the monuments of a yet earlier
race. But iron was certainly employed by the English, at least, from
about the first century of the Christian era, and its use was perhaps
introduced into the marshlands of Sleswick by the Germanic conquerors of
the north. Even at this early date, abundant proof exists of mercantile
intercourse with the Roman world (probably through Pannonia), whereby
the alien culture of the south was already engrafted in part upon the
low civilisation of the native English. Amber was then exported from the
Baltic, while gold, silver, and glass beads were given in return. Roman
coins are discovered in Low German tombs of the first five centuries in
Sleswick, Holstein, Friesland, and the Isles; and Roman patterns are
imitated in the iron weapons and utensils of the same period. Gold
byzants of the fifth century prove an intercourse with Constantinople
at the exact date of the colonisation of Britain. From the very earliest
moment when we catch a glimpse of its nature, the home-grown English
culture had already begun to be modified by the superior arts of Rome.
Even the alphabet was known and used in its Runic form, though the
absence of writing materials caused its employment to be restricted to
inscriptions on wooden tablets, on rude stone monuments, or on utensils
of metal-work. A golden drinking-horn found in Sleswick, and engraved
with the maker's name, referred to the middle of the fourth century,
contains the earliest known specimen of the English language.

The early English society was founded entirely on the tie of blood.
Every clan or family lived by itself and formed a guild for mutual
protection, each kinsman being his brother's keeper, and bound to avenge
his death by feud with the tribe or clan which had killed him. This duty
of blood-revenge was the supreme religion of the race. Moreover, the
clan was answerable as a whole for the ill-deeds of all its members; and
the fine payable for murder or injury was handed over by the family of
the wrong-doer to the family of the injured man.

Each little village of the old English community possessed a general
independence of its own, and lay apart from all the others, often
surrounded by a broad belt or mark of virgin forest. It consisted of a
clearing like those of the American backwoods, where a single family or
kindred had made its home, and preserved its separate independence
intact. Each of these families was known by the name of its real or
supposed ancestor, the patronymic being formed by the addition of the
syllable _ing_. Thus the descendants of AElla would be called AEllings,
and their _ham_ or stockade would be known as AEllingaham, or in modern
form Allingham. So the _tun_ or enclosure of the Culmings would be
Culmingatun, similarly modernised into Culmington. Names of this type
abound in the newer England at the present day; as in the case of
Birmingham, Buckingham, Wellington, Kensington, Basingstoke, and
Paddington. But while in America the clearing is merely a temporary
phase, and the border of forest is soon cut down so as to connect the
village with its neighbours, in the old Anglo-Saxon fatherland the
border of woodland, heath, or fen was jealously guarded as a frontier
and natural defence for the little predatory and agricultural community.
Whoever crossed it was bound to give notice of his coming by blowing a
horn; else he was cut down at once as a stealthy enemy. The marksmen
wished to remain separate from all others, and only to mix with those of
their own kin. In this primitive love of separation we have the germ of
that local independence and that isolated private home life which is one
of the most marked characteristics of modern Englishmen.

In the middle of the clearing, surrounded by a wooden stockade, stood
the village, a group of rude detached huts. The marksmen each possessed
a separate little homestead, consisting usually of a small wooden house
or shanty, a courtyard, and a cattle-fold. So far, private property in
land had already begun. But the forest and the pasture land were not
appropriated: each man had a right from year to year to let loose his
kine or horses on a certain equal or proportionate space of land
assigned to him by the village in council. The wealth of the people
consisted mainly in cattle which fed on the pasture, and pigs turned out
to fatten on the acorns of the forest: but a small portion of the soil
was ploughed and sown; and this portion also was distributed to the
villagers for tillage by annual arrangement. The hall of the chief rose
in the midst of the lesser houses, open to all comers. The village moot,
or assembly of freemen, met in the open air, under some sacred tree, or
beside some old monumental stone, often a relic of the older aboriginal
race, marking the tomb of a dead chieftain, but worshipped as a god by
the English immigrants. At these informal meetings, every head of a
family had a right to appear and deliberate. The primitive English
constitution was a pure republican aristocracy or oligarchy of
householders, like that which still survives in the Swiss forest
cantons.

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