Pollard A.F., The History of England. A study in political evolution.pdf

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The History of England
A study in political evolution
A. F. Pollard,
M.A., Litt.D.
CONTENTS
Chronological Table
Bibliography
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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 Whether neolithic man superseded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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