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How the Romanised Briton of England would have fared ultimately in his contest with the more savage Britons of the north and the west, who came to rob him down to his toga, if they had been left to fight it out, it is hard to say. Probably the course of events would have been that the English natives would first have yielded to the northern invaders, and afterwards absorbed them and made them partakers in their civilisation.

RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE A town of considerable importance at the time of the Norman Conquest

But the issue was never fought out. There had begun the most momentous swarming of a human race that history records. Along the Scandinavian and the Danish peninsulas, and the northern coast of Germany, there had been swelling up a vast population of fierce, strong, courageous and hungry men; Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen—they were all very much akin: big blue-eyed men of mighty daring mated with fair, chaste, fruitful women; and they swarmed out of their warrens to over-run the greater part of Europe. You may trace them to the interior of Russia, to Iceland, to Constantinople, some think to North America. But, whatever their path, the British Islands were athwart the track they took, and the British Islands received the most complete flood of Anglo-Saxon blood. Again it was England that made way most easily to the invader. The Anglo-Saxons came and cleared out the Romanised and Christian civilisation from Yorkshire to Kent. But the fiercer British natives who had held back the Romans, held back also these new invaders, helped thereto by the fact that their lands seemed to be hungry, and to offer but little booty. England, fat, fertile, like a beautiful park with its forests and meadows and rivers, was at once a richer and an easier prize.

The Anglo-Saxon probably made his conquest more easy by treachery and by fomenting discord among the Britons. There is a ballad by Thomas Love Peacock, which treats of such an Anglo-Saxon victory—with at least a shadow of a shade of historical warrant:—

"Come to the feast of wine and meat,"

Spake the dark dweller of the sea.

"There shall the hours in mirth proceed;

There neither sword nor shield shall be."

None but the noblest of the land,

The flower of Britain's chiefs were there;

Unarmed, amid the Saxon band

They sate, the fatal feast to share.

Three hundred chiefs, three score and three

Went, where the festal torches burned

Before the dweller of the sea;

They went, and three alone returned.

Till dawn the pale sweet mead they quaffed,

The ocean chief unclosed his vest,

His hand was on his dagger's haft,

And daggers glared at every breast.

Still it was an easy victory, that of Anglo-Saxon over Briton. But just as we must, in the light of recent knowledge, give up the idea that the Briton whom Julius Cæsar encountered was a woad-painted savage, so we must refuse to accept the impression (which is implied more often than directly stated) that the Romanised Briton, after the departure of the Roman legions, was quite helpless. Between the Roman departure from Britain and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms there, room must be found, somehow, for whatever of historical truth there is as a foundation for the Arthurian legends. On that point let old Caxton speak:—

Now it is notoriously known through the universal world that there be nine worthy and the best that ever were. That is to wit three paynims, three Jews, and three Christian men. As for the paynims they were tofore the Incarnation of Christ, which were named, the first Hector of Troy, of whom the history is come both in ballad and in prose; the second Alexander the Great; and the third Julius Cæsar, Emperor of Rome, of whom the histories be well-known and had.

And as for the three Jews which also were tofore the Incarnation of our Lord, of whom the first was Duke Joshua which brought the children of Israel into the land of behest; the second David, King of Jerusalem; and the third Judas Maccabæus; of these three the Bible rehearseth all their noble histories and acts.

And sith the said Incarnation have been three noble Christian men stalled and admitted through the universal world into the number of the nine best and worthy, of whom was first the noble Arthur, whose noble acts I purpose to write in this present book here following. The second was Charlemagne or Charles the Great, of whom the history is had in many places both in French and English; and the third and last was Godfrey of Bouillon, of whose acts and life I made a book unto the excellent prince and king of noble memory, King Edward the Fourth. The said noble gentleman instantly required me to imprint the history of the said noble king and conqueror, King Arthur, and of his knights, with the history of the Sangreal, and of the death and ending of the said Arthur; affirming that I ought rather to imprint his acts and noble feats, than of Godfrey of Bouillon, or any of the other eight, considering that he was a man born within this realm, and king and emperor of the same; and that there be in French divers and many noble volumes of his acts, and also of his knights.

To whom I answered, that divers men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables, by cause that some chronicles make of him no mention nor remember him no thing, nor of his knights. Whereunto they answered, and one in special said, that in him that should say or think that there was never such a king called Arthur, might well be credited great folly and blindness; for he said that there were many evidences of the contrary: first ye may see his sepulture in the Monastery of Glastonbury. And also in Polichronicon, in the fifth book of the sixth chapter, and in the seventh book and the twenty-third chapter, where his body was buried and after found and translated into the said monastery. Ye shall see also in the history of Bochas, in his book De Casu Principum, part of his noble acts, and also of his fall.

Also Galfridus in his British book recounteth his life; and in divers places of England many remembrances be yet of him and shall remain perpetually, and also of his knights. First in the Abbey of Westminster, at Saint Edward's shrine, remaineth the print of his seal in red wax closed in beryl, in which is written Patricius Arthurus, Britannæ, Gallie, Germanie, Dacie, Imperator. Item in the castle of Dover ye may see Gawaine's skull and Craddock's mantle, at Winchester the Round Table, in other places Launcelot's sword and many other things. Then all these things considered, there can no man reasonably gainsay but there was a king of this land named Arthur. For in all places, Christian and heathen, he is reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the first of the three Christian men. And also he is more spoken of beyond the sea, more books made of his noble acts than there be in England, as well in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, as in French. And yet of record remain in witness of him in Wales, in the town of Camelot, the great stones and marvellous works of iron, lying under the ground, and royal vaults, which divers now living hath seen.

I fear one cannot take Caxton's endorsement of Sir Thomas Malory as final evidence, and accept as historic a King Arthur who on one occasion invaded the European Continent and defeated in battle the troops of the Roman Emperor. But there were men to fight in England after the Romans left; and those beaten in the fight fell back on Scotland, on Wales, on Cornwall, and some of them wandered farther afield and colonised Brittany in France, a province which to-day reminds of Cornwall at a thousand points.

The Anglo-Saxons, like other nations, found the air of England civilising. They aspired to settle down in quiet comfort when there came from the east a fresh cloud of freebooters, the Danes, to claim a share in this delectable island. Dane and Saxon fought it out—the Briton from "the Celtic fringe" occasionally interfering—with all the hearty ill-will of blood relations, and as they fought shaped out a very good people, partly English, partly Saxon, partly Danish, and in the mountains partly British.

If you look over England with a seeing eye, you can notice the traces of each element in the nation's blood; and the landscape will partly explain why in one place there is a Celtic predominance, in another a Danish. Each national type sought and held the districts most suitable to its character.

After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the British race was the Norman. The Normans were not so much aliens as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while merged amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the present British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman—a hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous type, which in its making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take.

The Normans brought to England a higher knowledge of the arts than the Anglo-Saxons had. The Roman culture of Britain had been just as high as the Roman culture of Gaul. But in Britain its tradition had been lost to a great extent in the onrush of the rude, unlettered Anglo-Saxons. In Gaul the Norsemen had won only a district, not the whole country, and they had been surrounded by civilising influences and had reacted to them wonderfully. Practically all the fine buildings of England date from after the Norman Epoch. But it is a fact which will strike at once the student of those buildings, who afterwards compares them with contemporary Norman buildings in France, that Norman architecture was not transplanted to England. Whilst at Rouen, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, you see the churches usually in Flamboyant or Ogival Gothic; in England the churches of about the same date are in a more severe and straight-laced style. It is well worth the trouble to study somewhat closely the churches built by the Normans in France and by the Norman-English in England during the century after the Conquest. A clear indication will be found from the study that the Normans did not over-run and beat down the Anglo-Saxons; but that the Anglo-Saxon was the "predominant partner" almost from the first in the domestic economy of the nation, however badly he fared in the tented field against the Normans.

The antiquities of England, the edifices of England, the very fields of England will be understood better if they are looked at in the light of English history—not that bare-bones caricature of history which is a mere record of battles and kings, but the living history which traces to their sources the streams of our race. The England of to-day is beginning to know the wisdom of a close sympathetic study of the past. One of the signs of this awakening of the historical sense is the popularity of the open-air pageant reviving scenes of old. I shall always remember, among many of those pageants, a particularly fine one at Chester, a city of great historic importance.