the struggle went on with the material civilization of Britain, it was impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War was no sooner over than the warrior settled down into a farmer, and the home of the peasant churl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he had burnt. Little knots of kinsfolk drew together in "tun" and "ham" beside the Thames and the Trent as they had settled beside the Elbe or the Weser, not as kinsfolk only, but as dwellers in the same plot, knit together by their common holding within the same bounds. Each little village-commonwealth lived the same life in Britain as its farmers had lived at home. Each had its moot-hill or sacred tree as a centre, its "mark" as a border; each judged by witness of the kinsfolk and made laws in the assembly of its freemen, and chose the leaders for its own governance, and the men who were to follow headman or ealdorman to hundred court or war.

In more ways than one, indeed, the primitive organization of English society was affected by its transfer to the soil of Britain. Conquest begat the King. It is probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their own fatherland, where each tribe lived under the rule of its own customary ealdorman. But in a war such as that which they waged against the Britons it was necessary to find a common leader whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Kent or Wessex might follow; and such a leader soon rose into a higher position than that of a temporary chief. The sons of Hengest became kings in Kent; those of Elle in Sussex; the West-Saxons chose Cerdic for their king. Such a choice at once drew the various villages and tribes of each community closer together than of old, while the new ruler surrounded himself with a chosen war-band of companions, servants, or "thegns" as they were called, who were rewarded for their service by gifts from the public land. Their distinction rested, not on hereditary rank, but on service done to the King, and they at last became a nobility which superseded the "eorls" of the original English constitution. And as war begat the King and the military noble, so it all but begat the slave. There had always been a slave class, a class of the unfree, among the English as among all German peoples; but the numbers of this class, if unaffected by the conquest of Britain, were swelled by the wars which soon sprang up

among the English conquerors. No rank saved the prisoner taken in battle from the doom of slavery, and slavery itself was often welcomed as saving the prisoner from death. We see this in the story of a noble warrior who had fallen wounded in a fight between two English tribes, and was carried as a bond-slave to the house of a thegn hard by. He declared himself a peasant, but his master penetrated the disguise. "You deserve death," he said, "since all my brothers and kinsfolk fell in the fight;" but for his oath's sake he spared his life and sold him to a Frisian at London, probably a merchant such as those who were carrying English captives at that time to the market-place of Rome. But war was not the only cause of the increase of this slave class. The number of the "unfree" were swelled by debt and crime. Famine drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat;" the debtor unable to discharge his debt flung on the ground the freeman's sword and spear, took up the laborer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father, pressed by need, sold children and wife into bondage. The slave became part of the live-stock of the estate, to be willed away at death with horse or ox whose pedigree was kept as carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even the freeman's children by a slave-mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine is the calf that is born of my cow," ran the English proverb. The cabins of the unfree clustered round the home of the rich landowner as they had clustered round the villa of the Roman gentleman; ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not such a slavery as that we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare; if the slave were slain, it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his lord could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in the justicecourt, no kinsman to claim vengeance for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under the lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and flogged to death for his crime, or burned to death if the slave were

a woman.

Section III.-The Northumbrian Kingdom, 588-685.*

The conquest of the bulk of Britain was now complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire, through Derbyshire and skirting the forest of Arden, to the mouth of the Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands. From this time the character of the English conquest of Britain was wholly changed. The older wars of extermination came to an end, and as the invasion pushed westward in later times the Britons were no longer wholly driven from the soil, but mingled with their conquerors. A far more important change was that which was seen in the attitude of the English conquerors from this time towards each. other. Freed to a great extent from the common pressure of the war against the Britons, their energies turned to combats with one another, to a long struggle for overlordship which was to end in bringing about a real national unity. The WestSaxons, beaten back from their advance along the Severn valley, and overthrown in a terrible defeat at Faddiley, were torn by internal dissensions, even while they were battling for life against the Britons. Strife between the two rival kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira in the north absorbed the power of the Engle in that quarter, till in 588 the strength of Deira suddenly broke down, and the Bernician king, Æthelric, gathered the two peoples into a realm which was to form the later kingdom of Northumbria. Amid the confusion of north and south, the primacy among the conquerors was seized by Kent, where the

* Authorities.-Bæda's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum" is the one primary authority for this period. I have spoken fully of it and its writer in the text. The meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the West-Saxons have been brought by numerous insertions from Bæda to the shape in which they at present appear in the "English Chronicle." The poem of Cadmon has been published by Mr. Thorpe, and copious summaries of it are given by Sharon Turner ("Hist. of Anglo-Saxons," vol. iii. cap. 3) and Mr. Morley ("English Writers," vol. i.). The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, and those of Cuthbert by Bæda and an earlier contemporary biographer, which are appended to Mr. Stevenson's edition of the "Historia Ecclesiastica," throw great light on the religious condition of the North. For Guthlac of Crowland, see the "Acta Sanctorum" for April xi. For Theodore, and the English church which he organized, see Kemble (" Saxons in England," vol. ii. cap. 8-10), and above all the invaluable remarks of Dr. Stubbs in his "Constitutional History."

kingdom of the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called Æthelberht, who before 597 established his supremacy over the Saxons of Middlesex and Essex, as well as over the English of East Anglia and of Mercia as far north as the Humber and the Trent.

The overlordship of Æthelberht was marked by a renewal of that intercourse of Britain with the Continent which had been broken off by the conquests of the English. His marriage with Bertha, the daughter of the Frankish King Charibert of Paris, created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul. But the union had far more important results than those of which Æthelberht may have dreamed. Bertha, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a Christian. A Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul to Canterbury, the royal city of the kingdom of Kent; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin, was given them for their worship. The marriage of Bertha was an opportunity which was at once seized by the bishop who at this time occupied the Roman See, and who is justly known as Gregory the Great. A memorable story tells us how, when but a young Roman deacon, Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair of some youths who stood bound in the market-place of Rome. "From what country do these slaves come?" he asked the traders who brought them. "They are English, Angles!" the slave-dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humor. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, " with faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchants," from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable reply; "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their king?" "Ella," they told him; and Gregory seized on the words as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in Ella's land!" he cried, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought to sing it. Only three or four years had gone by, when the deacon had become Bishop of Rome, and Bertha's marriage gave him the opening he sought. After cautious negotiations with the rulers of Gaul, he sent a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the gospel to the English people. The missionaries landed in 597 on the very spot where Hengest had landed more than a century before in the Isle of Thanet; and the king received them sitting in the open

air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. He listened to the long sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him from Gaul translated it. "Your words are fair," Æthelberht replied at last with English good sense," but they are new and of doubtful meaning;" for himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter and protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their church. "Turn from this city, Lord," they sang, “ Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place," Alleluia!"

It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest should be yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure the reversal and undoing of the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was, in one sense, the return of the Roman legions who had retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the thought not of Gregory only but of such men as his own Jutish fathers had slaughtered and driven over sea that Æthelberht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of the new England, became the centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed the union with the western world which the landing of Hengest had all but destroyed. The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization, arts, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquest, returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that the codes