HistoryEngland.pdf

The History of England

A study in political evolution

A. F. Pollard,

M.A., Litt.D.

CONTENTS

Chapter.

I. The Foundations of England, 55 B.C.–A.D. 1066

II. The Submergence of England, 1066–1272

III. Emergence of the English People, 1272–1485

IV. The Progress of Nationalism, 1485–1603

V. The Struggle for Self-government, 1603–1815

VI. The Expansion of England, 1603–1815

VII. The Industrial Revolution

VIII. A Century of Empire, 1815–1911

IX. English Democracy

Chronological Table

Bibliography

Chapter I

The Foundations of England

55 B.C.–A.D. 1066

"Ah, well," an American visitor is said to have soliloquized on the

site of the battle of Hastings, "it is but a little island, and it has

often been conquered." We have in these few pages to trace the

evolution of a great empire, which has often conquered others, out of

the little island which was often conquered itself. The mere incidents

of this growth, which satisfied the childlike curiosity of earlier

generations, hardly appeal to a public which is learning to look upon

historical narrative not as a simple story, but as an interpretation of

human development, and upon historical fact as the complex resultant of

character and conditions; and introspective readers will look less for

a list of facts and dates marking the milestones on this national march

than for suggestions to explain the formation of the army, the spirit

of its leaders and its men, the progress made, and the obstacles

overcome. No solution of the problems presented by history will be

complete until the knowledge of man is perfect; but we cannot approach

the threshold of understanding without realizing that our national

achievement has been the outcome of singular powers of assimilation, of

adaptation to changing circumstances, and of elasticity of system.

Change has been, and is, the breath of our existence and the condition

of our growth.

Change began with the Creation, and ages of momentous development are

shrouded from our eyes. The land and the people are the two foundations

of English history; but before history began, the land had received the

insular configuration which has largely determined its fortune; and the

various peoples, who were to mould and be moulded by the land, had

differentiated from the other races of the world. Several of these

peoples had occupied the land before its conquest by the Anglo-Saxons,

some before it was even Britain. Whether neolithic man superseded

palaeolithic man in these islands by invasion or by domestic evolution,

we do not know; but centuries before the Christian era the Britons

overran the country and superimposed themselves upon its swarthy, squat

inhabitants. They mounted comparatively high in the scale of

civilization; they tilled the soil, worked mines, cultivated various

forms of art, and even built towns. But their loose tribal organization

left them at the mercy of the Romans; and though Julius Caesar's two

raids in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C. left no permanent results, the conquest

was soon completed when the Romans came in earnest in A.D. 43.

The extent to which the Romans during the three and a half centuries of

their rule in Britain civilized its inhabitants is a matter of doubtful

inference. The remains of Roman roads, Roman walls, and Roman villas

still bear witness to their material activity; and an occupation of the

land by Roman troops and Roman officials, spread over three hundred and

fifty years, must have impressed upon the upper classes of the Britons

at least some acquaintance with the language, religion, administration,

and social and economic arrangements of the conquerors. But, on the

whole, the evidence points rather to military occupation than to

colonization; and the Roman province resembled more nearly a German

than a British colony of to-day. Rome had then no surplus population

with which to fill new territory; the only emigrants were the soldiers,

the officials, and a few traders or prospectors; and of these most were

partially Romanized provincials from other parts of the empire, for a

Roman soldier of the third century A.D. was not generally a Roman or

even an Italian. The imperial government, moreover, considered the

interests of Britain not in themselves but only as subordinate to the

empire, which any sort of distinctive national organization would have

threatened. This distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rule

in India; and if the army in Britain gradually grew more British, it

was due to the weakness and not to the policy of the imperial

government. There was no attempt to form a British constitution, or

weld British tribes into a nation; for Rome brought to birth no

daughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. So

the nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and

distracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left

it more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger or

more united than before.

Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans had

themselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend the

eastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; and

it was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles and

Saxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as it

was by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts and

Scots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitation

from the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied the

original impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea.

Whatever its origin—whether pressure from other tribes behind,

internal dissensions, or the economic necessities of a population

growing too fast for the produce of primitive farming—the restlessness

was general; but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over the

Roman frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic call

to the sea and the setting sun.

This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations should

wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes

transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths

of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we are

at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Angles

at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out from

the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their

descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and

the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered

Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which

are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the

landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea

deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much

as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodge

them, and the absence of centralized government and national

consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent,

east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next

morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy

success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours,

the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and

rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and

all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home

of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be

traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south the

Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; in

the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north they

retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in which

they met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhaps

disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons,

South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed march

or borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons or

Welsh.

It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the

superiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, like

the Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to

a woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other

places taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the

approach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled

from east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that

of the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The

English hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in

that case some of the British women would be spared. It no more

required wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English

language and institutions in Britain than it required wholesale

slaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and a

large admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly be

denied.

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they

ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this

internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and

families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the

blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdoms

into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The

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