THE ANGLO-SAXONS AS ENGLISHMEN-THEIR VIRTUES 285

stead of being the domain of freemen, had become the home of nobles and their retainers, beneath whom was a race of serfs.* Still, many of the early ideas prevailed among the body of the people, to come to maturity at a later day. Aside from their passion for warfare, and their drunkenness-to which latter vice they, like the Netherlanders, have always been addicted—the English were a moral race. If they had no respect for beauty, they loved truth. This, with courage and fidelity, they held in supreme honor. Dwelling apart, not sensuous, inclined to melancholy, taking his pleasure sadly, as Froissart afterwards said of him, the Englishman built up the modern idea of home and family, in which the wife is the presiding deity. In the early days upon the Continent, she was her husband's companion in his wanderings; now that he had settled down to cultivate the soil, and had embraced Christianity, she became the manager of his household. The wife lived for her husband and children-a narrow, confined existence perhaps, but one which will breed heroes.‡

"The strength of the freedom of the common people, the selfrespect, and the martial excellence of the Angle-Saxon ceorl diminished from century to century, in spite of the guardian power which the king wielded."-Gneist, i. 108. As this writer has pointed out, the chief outward survival of the past was the preservation of the old Germanic judicial system which still surrounded personal freedom with protecting barriers (p. 113). As law was then administered this was not much, but it was something.

+ Gneist, p. 114.

Alfred thus describes her for his countrymen: "The wife now lives for thee-for thee alone. She has enough of all kind of wealth for the present life, but she scorns them all for thy sake alone. She has forsaken them all, because she has not thee with them. Thy absence makes her think that all she possesses is naught. Thus, for

Courage, fidelity, respect for truth, and love of home are great virtues, and in time will make the English the master race of the world; but they are virtues, after all, which are found among barbaric tribes. We can trace their originals in the picture which Tacitus draws of the ancient Germans in their native wilds. Of civilization the people had but a tinge, and that was derived from Rome and Roman Christianity. For the six centuries after the landing of Hengist and Horsa on the shores of Britain the history of England is almost a dead level, broken here and there by little hillocks, which seem to promise progress. *The progress, however, did not fol low, for in the middle of the eleventh century only about a third of the soil is under cultivation, and that of the rudest kind; the old Roman influence is gone forever; the new Romish churches and abbeys have been largely demolished; the great scholars are dead, the schools dispersed, and learning well-nigh extinguished. The one great result which has been accomplished for the future in all these years, apart from the introduction of a rude form of Christianity, is the substantial consolidation into one people of the heterogeneous mass of the early conquerors.+

love of thee she is wasted away, and lives near death from tears and grief."-Quoted by Taine, "English Literature."

*The chief eminence appears in the eighth century, when the kingdom of Northumbria had its famous schools at York and Jarrow, and was the intellectual centre of Western Christian Europe. Green, p. 72. But this period was brief.

The English system was strong in the cohesion of its lower organism-the association of individuals in the township, in the hundred, and in the shire. On this better-consolidated substructure was superimposed the better-consolidated Norman superstructure. Stubbs, i. 278.

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We are still in a very dark valley, but before us at length rises a lofty, brilliant mountain; it is the Norman Conquest, which, bringing with it for a time the civilization of the Continent, becomes the most important event in English history.*

The Normans proper were descended from the Northmen, or Scandinavians, who founded the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They have been called pirates, and such they were; but they were of a very different type from the early Saxons or the vulgar pirates of a later day. Their corsairs were, in fact, the merchants of the North, combining, according to the custom of the times, commerce with piracy. That they should have made such rapid development after they settled in France, formerly seemed something like a miracle, but the miraculous element is rapidly passing out of history. In this case, recent investigations show that long before the Normans left their Northern home they, too, had been brought into contact with the great reservoirs of civilization to which modern Europe owes so much. Sailing up the Dwina and the Oder, and then down the Volga and the Dnieper, they had for ages been in communication with Constantinople and the regions about the Black Sea and the Caspian. Thence they had brought back spices, pearls, silks, and linen garments. All this may seem strange enough to those who have been accustomed to regard the country about the Baltic as an unexplored wilderness of barbarism until a recent date. But it must be remembered that until about the tenth century the only communication

"The will of destiny cannot be gainsaid. Just as Germany, without its connection with Italy, so England, without its connection with France, would never have been what it is."-Ranke, i. 38.

between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was by inland routes. It is possible that even the frozen North benefited more from this communication than England under its Anglo-Saxon rulers.*

Leaving their Northern homes, these merchant corsairs had ravaged the coast of Europe as far as Spain, had plundered many cities, including Paris, and had made their name terrible even in Italy itself. In 911, Charles the Simple of France locates a band of them on French soil, in a district afterwards known as Normandy, thinking thereby to purchase their allegiance. The scheme proved a marked success. Rolf, or Rollo, the pirate chief, receives baptism, takes the title of duke, and becomes a loyal servant of his king. It was by Norman

แ

*Upon the island of Gothland, in the Baltic, have been found great numbers of Roman and Byzantine coins, and its surface is dotted over with the ruins of ancient buildings, many of them of great size and architectural beauty. Canon Adams, of Bremen, a chronicler of the eleventh century, tells of a trading city at the mouth of the Oder, “ a town rich in the wares of all Eastern people, and which contains much that is charming and precious.”—“ The Hansa Towns," by Zimmern, p. 23. The towns of the Hanseatic League derived their wealth from trade with the Baltic. It is a curious fact that so early as the tenth century German traders dealing with England paid part of their tribute in pepper, a product peculiar to the East. Idem, p. 16. Some writers have traced a connection between the Venetians of the Adriatic and the Vends or Venedes of the Baltic. Idem, p. 23. See also, as to this whole subject, "The Viking Age," by Paul Du Chaillu, especially vol. i. chap. xv. pp. 262 and 276; also vol. ii. p. 219. When the English opened a trade with Russia, in the days of Elizabeth, they attempted one trip to Persia by the old route of the Northmen, up the Dwina, down the Volga, and across the Caspian Sea. Camden, p. 418. This voyage, which, I believe, has never been noticed by later historians, shows that the route was known even five hundred years after the Norman Conquest.

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help, later on, that France was raised to the rank of an independent kingdom; and Hugh Capet, instead of being a vassal of kings of German lineage, became the father of French sovereigns.*

For over a century and a half these Northmen had been settled on the soil of France, intermarrying with the natives, imbibing the ancient civilization, and, with the aptness for culture which marks a mixed race, making even more rapid progress than the French themselves. As a Teutonic people, they were perhaps remotely related to the Anglo-Saxons, but they bore little resemblance to their distant kinsmen whom they found in England. William of Malmesbury, the old chronicler, says: "The Saxons vied with each other in their drinking feasts, and wasted their goods by day and night in feasting, while they lived in wretched hovels; the French and Normans, on the other hand, lived inexpensively in their fine large houses, were besides studiously refined in their food, and careful in their habits."

These, then, are the men who, in 1066, to the number of sixty thousand, about one third Normans and the rest made up of other nationalities, land at Hastings, conquer England with its two millions of inhabitants, and make it for centuries a French country. The conquest was an easy one. The Frenchmen, for so we may call them all, were trained warriors, fighting on horseback, with long steel-pointed lances, and clad in complete armor. The English fought on foot; some in armor wielded heavy battle-axes, but the mass of the army was composed of rude peasants carrying scythes, clubs, and sharpened poles. The heavy but swift-moving cavalry gave the victory to the foreigners.

*Fisher's "Outlines of Universal History," p. 247.