referred to, cattle and sheep, the skins and furs of wild animals, wild beasts themselves for the Roman games, hunting dogs, and a large number of slaves. Kentish oysters were also known in Rome. Most of the ordinary clothing

and textile fabrics for domestic use were made in the island itself, and so too were the coarser kinds of pottery, and great quantities of bricks and tiles. The imports consisted of a limited supply of the finer kinds of cloth and pottery for the use of the upper classes, of wine, and ivory, amber, and all kinds of metallic ornaments.2 Exports were almost certainly in excess of imports, since, like all provinces subject to the Roman rule, Britain had to pay heavy taxes to its conquerors. These included the tributum, or property and income-tax; the annona, a fixed quantity of corn for the Roman armies in Britain and on the Continent; and portoria, or import duties. The collection of the lastnamed was made at the harbours with which our coasts abounded, though the fact that these harbours were so numerous, and the ships of that time so light that they could run in almost anywhere, probably caused a large amount of smuggling. In this connection it should be noticed that many towns standing on rivers, now inaccessible to our large ships, were used as ports for sea-going vessels, both in Roman and in medieval times. Such were Exeter, Lincoln, Nottingham, York, and a host of others.5 The rivers themselves also formed natural highways into the interior, which were used far more then than now 6 in proportion to the amount of trade carried on. As regards the population, it is impossible to form an exact estimate. Cæsar speaks of "an infinite number of people" as living

1 They also knew how to dye these in purple, scarlet, and other colours. Pliny, Hist. Nat., xvi. 8; xxii. 26.

2 The Britons were very fond of these, using brass and iron, if they could not get gold. Social England, vol. i. p. 103.

3 F. T. Richards in Social England, vol. i. p. 21. A five per cent. legacy duty was also levied on those who had the Roman franchise.

4 Euminius, Pan. Constant., c. 11. and cf. "Innumerable ports, some since silted up and forgotten, some perhaps buried in the German Ocean." Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 153.

5 Social England, vol. i. p. 205.

6 Cf. examples of their use in Continental traffic in my Commerce in Europe, §§ 68, 69, and cf. § 26. 7 Cæsar, B. G., vi. 12.

in the south-east, and the story of the sack of Verulamium, when 70,000 Romans are said to have been massacred,1 although the number is probably exaggerated, yet shows that the towns at least were populous. The condition of agriculture and trade also, which was more flourishing than it became for some time after the Saxon conquests, would lead us to suppose a fairly numerous population, though the unreclaimed and wooded nature of much of the country prevented it from being by any means dense. But, on the whole, it was a fairly flourishing province and people on which the Saxons descended.

1 Tacitus, Ann., xiv. 33.

C

CHAPTER III

THE SAXON PERIOD

§ 18. The Saxon Invasions.

THE development of Roman Britain, after proceeding for three and a half centuries, was gradually checked by the weakness of the Roman power. As everyone knows, Rome had in the fifth century enough to do in defending the Continental portions of her empire without troubling about an outlying province like Britain. The Romans were compelled to leave Britain to its fate, and their legions had to quit its shores. But years before they went the Eastern and South-Eastern coast of the island had been harried by pirates of Teutonic race, "the second wave of the Aryans," and a special officer had to be appointed to keep them in check. He was known as the Count (Comes) of the Saxon shore,1 and had command of a squadron and a line of nine forts extending from Brancaster on the Wash to Pevensey on the coast of Sussex. Besides these Saxon pirates, the Picts and Scots raided the country, venturing on one occasion (368 A.D.) as far south as the banks of the Thames, and, thus harassed both by sea and land, the unfortunate Britons might well cry out, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea to the barbarians; we are massacred or must be drowned."

In course of time the barbarians conquered the country. The conquest was the result not of one but of a series of invasions and expeditions, which, beginning at first as mere piratical raids, assumed by the middle of the fifth century the more serious aspect of victorious colonisation and migration.2 Into the details of that conquest we have not time to go, but it has been picturesquely and minutely

1 I.e., the shore infested by the Saxon pirates, not that colonised by the Saxons, as some think. Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. c. iv. p. 19, and Freeman, Norman Conquest, I. p. 11. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. iv. p. 59,

When the "East they did up the

described by the graphic author of the Making of England. It is, however, interesting to note that the expeditions of the Saxon invaders were, as much perhaps from the nature of the country as from the manner of their inception, independent and separate one from the other. Saxons" landed in Essex, proceeding as valleys of the Colne and Stour, they found a junction with the invaders of Kent (even had they wished one) blocked by a gigantic forest, which prevented further progress southward.1 But, leaving the manner and details of the conquest to others, it is of prime importance to the economic historian to discover how far the Saxons destroyed or left undisturbed the inhabitants of the conquered country. Here we come at once to disputed ground. Some have thought that they practically made a clean sweep of all the institutions, both Roman and British, which they found, and began history afresh with Teutonic customs and manners both in political and industrial life.2 "The Britons fled from their homes; 3 whom the sword spared famine and pestilence devoured: the few that remained either refused or failed altogether to civilise the conquerors." This view is based upon the exaggerated statements of mere ecclesiastical historians like Bede and Gildas, who had a natural prejudice against the heathen Saxons, and wished to draw a dark picture of the sufferings of their church. It is adopted also by those who like to make picturesque generalisations from striking but insufficient data, and who take the utter devastation of places like Andredes-Ceaster as typical of what happened to the whole country. A truer view is that which, while admitting the disappearance of many of the upper class, the Romans and Romanised Britons, infers from a number of very different facts the survival of the great mass of the British population. "The common belief that the Celtic population of Britain was exterminated or driven into Wales and Brittany by the Saxons has absolutely no 1 Epping and Hainault forests are its relics now. Cf. Airy, Hist. of Eng., p. 9.

2 So Stubbs, I. iv. p. 61, who heads one paragraph “general desolation." 3 lb.

So Green, whose judgment seems here at fault, Short History, pp. 10, 11; and his numerous followers-e.g., Airy, Hist. of Eng., p. 10.

foundation in history";1 and the great Gibbon, fully as he describes the havoc wrought by the Saxons in art, religion, and political institutions, carefully points out that this does not imply the extirpation of the subject population itself. 'Neither reason nor facts," he says, can justify the unnatural supposition that the Saxons of Britain remained alone in the desert which they had subdued. After the sanguinary barbarians had secured their dominion, it was their interest to preserve the peasants as well as the cattle of the unresisting country. In each successive revolution the patient herd becomes the property of its new masters, and the salutary compact of food and labour is silently ratified by their mutual necessities." 2 Or, as a less celebrated author concisely puts it, the object of the Saxon invaders was not "to settle in a desert, but to live at ease, as an aristocracy of soldiers, drawing rent from a peaceful population of tenants," and we may add, as time went on, assisting in the calm pursuits of peace themselves.

The facts of archæology, ethnology, and language, to some of which we have already referred, and the curious survivals and customs of the manorial system, to which we shall come presently, bear out this supposition. It is certain, for instance, that there is a large proportion of Celtic and preCeltic blood in the population even of the east of England as well as of the west, and the English language itself, which has been called "the tongue of one people spoken by another," is regarded by some as further confirmatory evidence.* Women and slaves were sure to have been kept alive rather 1 Pearson, Hist. of Eng., I. p. 99. 2 Decline and Fall, ch. xxxviii.

3 Pearson, Hist. of Eng., I. p. 101. Cf. also Ashley (preface to F. de Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p. 32.), "the destruction of Roman or Romanised landowners is not inconsistent with the undisturbed residence upon the rural estates of the great body of actual labourers."

4 F. York Powell in Social England, Vol. I. p. 132. On the other hand, Prof. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, &c., Vol. I. p. 60, thinks there must have been "a general displacement of population to allow of the introduction of a new speech"; but there are plenty of historical cases to prove the contrary. There is no general law regulating the survival of languages; sometimes that of the conqueror, sometimes that of the conquered prevails. Cf. Walpole, Land of Home Rule, p. 76, and Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 209. The Celtic language did not prevail in France, though the Celtic race has remained. The destruction of the